


Dark, Dark My Light

by walkingsaladshooter



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, F/M, In which I am unapologetically on my atmospherics bullshit as usual, Magic as a rough stand-in for the Force, Shared Dreams, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-03 04:45:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17277314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkingsaladshooter/pseuds/walkingsaladshooter
Summary: The thing about the Gift, about magic, is that it comes with a light and a shadow. Rey knows what the light feels like. Light-work is what her coven does. But the forest is calling her, and a man she doesn't know is appearing in her dreams. And the pull to the forest, to the man, doesn't feel like the light. She's pretty sure it's the shadow.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A witchcraft AU, inspired by a gifset by my dear crossingwinter ([AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter)/[Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/crossingwinter)). Written for the Reylo Charity Anthology.
> 
> Magic/witchcraft is more or less a sub-in for the Force, but characters who aren't Force-sensitive in canon have magic in this AU because otherwise the coven would be ridiculously tiny, haha.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,  
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;  
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—  
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.  
I live between the heron and the wren,  
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul  
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!  
I know the purity of pure despair,  
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.  
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,  
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!  
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,  
And in broad day the midnight come again!  
A man goes far to find out what he is—  
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,  
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.  
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,  
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?  
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.  
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,  
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

— “In a Dark Time,” Theodore Rhoetke

 

——

 

The stars and the glowing moon seem to wheel in the sky above the circle. The fire leaps high, crackling orange and yellow against the dark. Outside the circle, the field is wet with dew, and the trees at the edge of the forest loom like leggy giants in the shadows. Rey’s mouth is dry and her head is beginning to ache sharply between her brows, but she keeps chanting, her voice ringing out clear in the night along with the coven.  
  
Luke’s voice is the strongest as he calls across the veils of the world to the spirits that are, somewhere, all around them, so Rey has been told. (So she feels, in times like this, when she opens herself and presses lightly against that thin barrier.) He calls out words of protection and petition while Maz throws handfuls of summoning powder into the fire, making it dance and flicker reddish-purple, while Leia and Finn walk the perimeter of the circle, working to keep the shields strong, while Rey and Paige and Rose and Kaydel follow Luke’s chant to lend their strength to his requests.  
  
Time gets blurry once rituals begin. Rey vaguely recognizes that Luke is nearing the end of the petition, but it still catches her off guard when he lifts his cup and flings the water onto the fire. It sputters but doesn’t go out — it’s not nearly enough water for that — and she stops chanting. With their voices gone, all she can hear are the pops and hisses of the logs on the fire, the crickets in the field, and her own pulse beating in her ears.  
  
She rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand. Rose yawns. Leia and Finn come back around to their side of the circle, closing down the shields as they go. Rey closes her eyes and reaches out, and she feels it like seeing it: a shimmering blue-white thing, like sunlight moving on the surface of water, slipping down into the earth, flowing under their feet, dissipating into the soil and into all of them. Closing down the energy they raised.  
  
“Well, that should hold another month,” Luke says. “And if I’m not mistaken, Chewie should have food ready in the cabin.”  
  
“Thank both gods.” Kaydel lays her hands alongside her neck, rolling her head from one side to the other. “I need a refuel.”  
  
“What’d he make?” Rose asks.  
  
Leia smiles. “Flatbread pizzas. Sausage and peppers for the rest of us, eggplant and onions and no cheese on yours, Kaydel.”  
  
Rey keeps staring into the fire, eyes dry, half-listening, until someone nudges her elbow. She glances up. Finn, raising his eyebrows at her. “Want me to bring you some?”  
  
“Yes.” Chewbacca isn’t a witch, not by half; but he’s an old friend of Luke and Leia, and he helps them out, sometimes, when the entire coven has to do rituals. And his flatbread pizzas are delicious. It’s a blessing. “And the biggest, hottest cup of tea you can get, please.”  
  
He nods, and he walks with the others out of the circle and up to the cabin, where the windows on the first floor are glowing. Rey sits down on one of the log seats around the fire and stretches out her legs.  
  
The circle, the field, the night seem so empty once they stop filling it with their power. It’s still there, though, if she reaches for it. Humming in her blood, in the earth under her heels, even in the dead log under her hands. Blazing in the fire. Glowing cool in the distant sky. These are the things she’s been able to feel, this past year.  
  
Someone’s car starts. Paige and Kaydel, probably, carpooling back home. Paige has the next flame-tending shift after Rey, so she’ll want to sleep before it. Rey listens to the fire, and the crickets, and the wind.

Finn comes back, carrying a plate of pizza and a travel mug. He hands off the plate and Rey inhales half the pizza before he can say anything.  
  
“Did you at least get a shortened shift because of the ritual?”  
  
“The schedule didn’t work out,” she says around a mouthful of peppers and cheese. “Paige won’t be here ‘til six tomorrow morning.”

“That sucks.”

Rey shrugs and licks sauce off her thumb. “It is what it is.”

He’s quiet for a minute. Rey takes a sip of the tea. It’s nearly too hot and almost too strong, which means it’s perfect. Then Finn says, “That was good work.”

“It felt good,” she says.

“You’re like, really Gifted, you know.”

“Finn, we’re all witches. We’re all Gifted.”

“But you.” He shakes his head and holds out a napkin to her. Sauce on her chin, apparently. She wipes it off as he continues. “Rituals have gotten better since you joined.”

Rey rolls her eyes. “Because there’s another set of hands. That’s all.”

He’s smiling at her, warm as the firelight. “I wonder sometimes.”

From the shadows stretching between the cabin and the circle, Rose appears, stepping into the orange glow. “Here, Rey.” She holds out a bag of the coven’s traditional power pucks. “Leia sent them. Said she knew you’d get hungry before morning.”

Rey grins at Rose and Finn, tucking the bag down on top of her backpack. “Sure. For desperate times.”

“Which overnight shifts always are. Speaking of which, I’m kind of wiped out from flame-tending the evening shift and then the ritual—”

“Heard.” Finn tilts back his head so Rose can bend down and kiss him. “Rey, need anything else before we go?”

“I’m good. You get home. I’ll see you later. And tell Chewie I said thank you. The pizza was good.”

They walk off into the darkness hand in hand, and Rey turns back to the fire.

It’s been burning since Luke was a boy, always with a member of the coven watching it, feeding it new wood, honoring what it means. The link between the coven and the Old Gods. Rey shivers and scoots closer to the fire. Flame-tending shifts get harder as it gets colder. She presses her knees together and stares into the flames and tries to feel what it means.

It’s hard to focus, though. The circle expands around them, then the grassy field expands past that, and then the trees begin and the forest reaches for miles. The sky is a big dark bowl overhead, peppered with stars and clear as anything. This is the part Rey is the least used to, even after a year. Finding out she had the Gift? Being asked to join Temple Coven and become a witch? Learning to tap into that Gift to work change on the world? Those were easier, almost. Like opening a drawer full of things she’d always had but had forgotten about.

But the field and the forest and the sky. The squirrels and the owls and the bats and the bees and the deer and the rabbits and the gods-damned mosquitoes. The quiet. The clarity of the stars. After a lifetime in an overcrowded underfunded orphanage on a block with only two spindly trees, then a string of tiny, cramped, hot studio apartments with nothing around but pavement and maybe a window-box of half-dead begonias, all of the nature in the hills up at the circle feels almost alien.

She loves it, though. She’d never known the air could feel like this.

She has plenty of time to enjoy it on flame-tending shifts. They aren’t supposed to read books or listen to podcasts or draw or anything to pass the time. The whole point is to honor the flame. Rey tries to meditate for a while. (This was one of the first things Luke taught her, a bit gruffly — to open her mind to the flame, and through it to the Old Gods, to her Gift itself; to open herself and touch the veils and find what lay within. _I shall honor the Old Gods and tend the flame_ — that was the second line of the oath she’d sworn. _I shall listen to my Gift_ — that was from the last line. She recited it, sometimes, while staring into the fire.)

But it’s hard to pay attention to the fire. Because it’s getting chillier the closer it gets to Veilnight, and because the sky is so pretty, and because the forest keeps calling her.  
  
It’s happening all the time, now. When it started two weeks ago it only happened sometimes, in fleeting moments. But now it’s all the time. Any time she’s at the cabin or in the circle, she can feel something deep in the trees pulling at her. But she hasn’t followed it yet.

The thing about the Gift, about magic, is that it comes with a light and a shadow. That’s what the Old Gods are: the balance of light and shadow. But the Temple Coven only does light-work. Protection spells, shields and wards, blessings and uncrossings, cleansing, luck magic, whistling up a rainstorm, calling on the spirits, shapeshifting, transmutation — only light-work. The single exception is divination, which is shadow-work, but which is also Leia’s specialty. Rey has more than an idle guess that this played a large part in its inclusion.

“The shadow isn’t evil,” Leia had told her when Luke had strangely, gruffly, refused to discuss it. “It’s as neutral as the light. But it can more easily tempt you down an evil road. So we don’t teach shadow-work here.”

“You know it, though,” Rey had said. “You’re so good at divination. And Rose told me Luke is good at enchantments.”

Leia had arched one eyebrow. “Rose Tico,” she said, not exactly smiling, “should not have known that.”

And that’s the thing about this, about this pull, this thing that seems to crawl out of the woods and sneak inside her and wrap around her gut and tug her towards the trees. Rey knows what the light feels like. She spends most of the time washed in it. And the pull doesn’t feel like the light. She’s pretty sure it’s the shadow.

So she tends the fire and eats a couple power pucks (dense, seedy, dry things, made more for sustenance than for flavor or texture, hence their nickname) when she gets hungry. And when the sky is just barely washing a lighter blue in the east, Paige’s little car pulls up into the gravel pit next to the cabin, and she emerges with a wave to Rey and a coffee in hand, and Rey can go home, leaving the forest and its call behind.

 

 

 

Rey’s living room window has a table in front of it. Half of the table is her home altar to the Old Gods, with its dish of water and dish of stones and incense burner and bundles of dried flowers and herbs tied into wreaths. The other half is cluttered with cacti and succulents, half in simple terra cotta pots, half in all manner of containers she’s repurposed, drilling drainage holes into the bottoms. Above the couch is a shelf she installed herself, crammed full of philodendrons and snake plants and one long winding pothos, a peperomia and one pretty striped calathea. Her bedroom has ferns on the dresser and spider plants hanging from the ceiling and a precious parlor palm that started tiny and is now tall and full and bushy.

She’s moved every single one of them from one crappy apartment to another, carefully, in multiple trips in her old car, and now they have more room to breathe in her first one-bedroom.

Temple Coven does rites to protect the city, keep the weather safe, keep the spirits from getting restless and pushing too hard against the veils. So the city grants them housing and a small stipend. Rey knows it’s not a glamorous apartment. Her bedroom is only just big enough for her bed, bedside table, and dresser. The kitchen is tiny. The windows screech softly when she opens them, which she has to do by turning an old crank handle. But it’s hers, and it’s bigger than any place she’s lived before, and she has south-facing windows.

She loves sitting on the couch in her underwear, drinking her tea and eating her sandwiches. She loves waking up and wandering sleepily to check on all her plants, watering whoever needs watered, turning them once a week to make sure they’re getting even sun. She loves lying in her bed, comfy under all her covers, staring out the window at the rain dripping off the overhang of her building.

The one thing she misses is her old job at the bicycle repair shop. Joining the coven had meant leaving there. Flame-tending shifts and a variety of full-coven rituals (some of which were fairly spontaneous) didn’t leave one particularly reliable for regular shop hours. And the city stipend, while kind, is small.

Endless packets of ramen and instant oatmeal are no stranger to Rey. But she gets restless without regular work, and it’s nice to have more than ramen and oatmeal. So she offers her services as a witch in the city as well.

Today she has a three-fer, an uncrossing/cleansing/protection on an extremely haunted house out on the south side flats. By the time it’s done, she’s exhausted and hungry and is happy to accept her payment, stop by her favorite noodle place, and get back to her apartment to cozy up and have her dinner.

That’s how her weekend passes: a few more cleansings (her specialty, which have come as easily to her as breathing since she first opened herself to her Gift), a couple uncrossings (which take more out of her, but which are extremely effective by her hand). On Saturday, a morning flame-tending shift before her scheduled cleansings, but on Sunday, her time to herself. Food cart tacos in the park with Finn, bubbly rosé hidden in paper coffee cups, soaking up the last park lunch days before it gets truly cold. Cleaning her oven and her bathtub. Sunday night she falls asleep worn-out in the good kind of way, straight into deep, deep sleep.

When she dreams, she’s in a forest. No — she’s in the forest. The trees just beyond the field where the circle lies. The trees that dance in the last flickers of light from the fire. But there’s no fire glow in her dream. She’s deep in the trees, deep in the forest, surrounded by the fog, the moon distant overhead beyond the canopy.

Everything is cool and still and very, very quiet. And there’s a man standing in front of her. His hair and clothes are black and his face is pale and his eyes are dark and deep like the forest. Rey opens her mouth to ask him a question.

She blinks and winces at the blare of her alarm clock. It’s five o’clock and she needs to get going.

Her morning shift routine is so streamlined and bound into muscle memory that she’s in the bathroom, teeth brushed and already climbing in the shower, before she remembers that she had been dreaming. The man in the woods. She showers, dresses, dips her fingertips in the water on her altar and touches it to the heads of the statuettes of the Old Gods, checks on her plants, makes a travel mug of tea and gets a packet of oatmeal, grabs her backpack. By the time she’s in her car, heading out on the twenty-minute drive to the circle, she should have mostly forgotten her dream. It should be reduced to little more than cobwebs. But if anything, it’s stronger. If anything, she remembers the line of his nose and the cool fog of the forest even more clearly.

It’s still dark. The sun won’t be coming up until her shift starts. Rey rolls down the window, shivering in the chilly pre-dawn air. It doesn’t help her shake it.

When she parks next to the cabin, her eyes dart right to the treeline. That thing in her gut pulls harder, plucks at her Gift. She ignores it and goes inside.

The cabin is warm. (The cabin is always warm.) She heats some water for her oatmeal, stirs in a spoonful of peanut butter and a handful of raisins from the communal pantry. She makes a cup of herbal tea, calendula with a spoonful of honey. At exactly six o’clock, she goes outside to the circle, to the fire, where Luke is waiting.

He’s staring into the fire with a crease between his eyebrows. Rey hands him the cup of honeyed tea, then sits on the log next to him, making herself comfortable with her oatmeal and her own (black, very caffeinated) tea. He takes a couple sips before saying, “Thanks.”

“No problem. Calendula’s good for recovering after a shift.”

“I know.”

“Anything exciting?” she asks around a mouthful of oatmeal.

Luke snorts softly and shakes his head. “Everything is fine.”

“Good.”

She’s focused on her breakfast, but she feels him look at her. When he leans forward to set the tea mug on the ground, she sees in her peripherals that his brow is furrowed. But he doesn’t say anything, so she doesn’t say anything, and she pretends she doesn’t notice him staring, puzzling. It's hard to talk to Luke. Him staring at her like there's something on her face (which he does more often than she'd like) doesn't make it any easier.

The sky is getting lighter in the east. Luke stands up slowly, stretching his legs. “Do you need anything?” he asks.

“Nope. I’m all good.”

“Have a good shift, then.” He pauses, staring into the fire for a moment longer. Then he heads back towards the cabin, and Rey exhales, letting her shoulders relax.

She looks over to the forest, and her heart starts beating harder, and her fingers curl tighter around the bowl.

The morning grows warmer when the sun comes up, and Rey can shed her heavier sweater. The birds sing and the fire crackles and she does her best to focus on the flames, on the meditation of them. But the pull is crawling all over her skin, plucking at her attention, drawing her eyes.

It wriggles its way into the core of her, into some part of her she doesn’t look at very often.

She knows the light better than the shadow, she’d say, because she spends more time with it. The cleansings that come so naturally to her, the uncrossings that take so well under her hand, her luck charms that always work and her blessings that always leave a soft glow. She’s had trouble with transmutation and hasn’t even dared try shapeshifting, but they feel friendly to her, if still beyond her. They do light-work in Temple. She knows it.

But there’s something in the beating heart of her that knows the shadow, too. Because the call from the forest is familiar. It’s like a memory she can’t quite unlock. It’s like something that’s been living within her all her life, quiet and sleeping, waiting to wake up. She just doesn’t know if she should try to rouse it. She isn’t sure what that would do to her.

When Kaydel gets there at noon, Rey takes her things into the cabin and locks herself in the bathroom. She splashes cold water on her face and blinks away the droplets, meets her own gaze in the mirror. She can go home now. She needs to vacuum. She had planned to call some clients to set up appointments for their routine cleansings.

Instead she stays in the cabin. There’s always something to eat in the pantry and plenty of tea to get her through the day, and there’s plenty of work for her to do. Veilnight is coming up soon. It’s their biggest ritual of the year, and there’s a lot to plan and prepare. So she spends hours cleaning and cleansing and rearranging the working altar in the main room, the two shrines to the two Old Gods, sweeping out the cabin itself and scrubbing it down. She inventories their stock of herbs and dried flowers and roots and spices, catalogs the jars of mushrooms, makes lists of what they’ll need to restock before the ritual. She can’t see the trees unless she’s by the window, but the call to the forest only gets stronger. So she writes her lists in even more detail.

Nobody else comes to the cabin today. Rey works until the sun is setting and she sees Rose relieve Kaydel out by the fire. Then she puts her things in her backpack and picks up a pack of tarot cards from the cupboard.

She passes Rose, who smiles at her. “I saw your car. Have you been here all day?”

“Yeah. I’m kind of restless so I thought I’d get some things done.” She holds up the cards. “Gonna go try to work on this, now.”

“Do you want any help? You can sit with me, if you want.”

Rey shakes her head. “I need to figure it out on my own, I think. But thanks.” She nods her head towards the trees. “I’m gonna go out there. Try to get some quiet and meditate on it.”

Rose’s face is hard to read. “Okay. Let me know if I can help. And be safe out there.”

“I will. Thanks.” And then she goes, away from the light of the fire, towards the deepening darkness of the trees.

They loom closer and closer. Rey’s heart is pounding. When she steps through the treeline, her breath catches, and she almost stops. But she pushes her foot forward, and then the other, and she keeps walking, following the thing pulling on her until its momentum is carrying her.

It gets darker the further in she goes, as she sun finishes setting, as the trees grow thicker. It's the first time she's been in the forest alone in her entire life, and it's overwhelming, in a way. Everything is lush and close-growing, green and orange and red in the autumn. It smells like damp earth and she can hear little rustlings off behind the trees that she's pretty sure are chipmunks but can't say for certain.

She picks her way through the undergrowth and listens to the beating of her heart in her ears and her own breath rushing and the leaves and sticks crunching and cracking underfoot, and she knows she ought to walk more quietly in the woods but she can’t help it, now.

Then she stumbles into a clearing and the moonlight is spilling down and she drops the pack of tarot cards.

He’s there, the man from her dream, crouching in front of a makeshift altar made of stacked stones. Her heart is pounding and her breath is rushing and he turns and looks at her. It’s him, all pale face and dark hair and long strong nose and eyes like the heart of the forest, and she opens her mouth to ask a question.

But he says, “It’s you,” and her question dies on her tongue.

He stands, unfurling long limbs. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and dressed in black, would vanish into the forest if not for the moonlight here. And the hints of shadow Rey felt before are not hints now; they’re waves, huge and deep and powerful. The shadow is rolling off him like the light rolls off Luke, even more. And something in her is rising to meet it.

The man furrows his brow, but his mouth is soft. “Who are you?”

Rey can’t answer. He’s all shadow in the moonlight. “I should—” She shakes her head, and she turns, and she runs. Not because she think he’ll chase her. But because she doesn’t trust her feet to keep moving forward unless she runs.

He doesn’t chase her. She makes it back to the treeline, leans against a tree to catch her breath and pull herself together enough to give Rose an excuse about being too tired when she passes her again, gets into her car and drives home with fingers shivering against the steering wheel. She locks herself inside her apartment and stands in her dark living room, arms wrapped around herself, feeling pulled in three different directions and not knowing what to do with any of them. Finally she makes a cup of chamomile tea and then gets into bed and relaxes her muscles one by one until sleep finally finds her.

But he’s there, even in sleep. It’s like she never left the forest, except in her dream it’s foggier, the edges of things a little more blurred. The feeling of it, though, is even clearer, sharper, like everything in the world has distilled down to this moment, hyper-focusing it. She can hear her breath, and his. She can hear her own heartbeat.

“Who are you?” he asks again, just like he had in the real forest.

She licks her lips. “I’m Rey.” Her fingers curl and uncurl at her side. “Who are you?”

“Kylo Ren.”

It’s a strange name, like a fairy-tale. Like a dream. This is her dream, right? And was he— did she really—

“You were really in the forest tonight.” It’s not exactly a question; there’s an easy confidence in his face.

“So were you,” she says.

“I’d seen you before that. In another dream.” He tilts his head. “And you saw me.”

“Yes.”

A wry smile plays at the corner of his soft mouth. “Are you the one doing this?”

“Doing what?” Her hands feel cold.

Kylo gestures vaguely. “The dream. Pulling us both into it.”

“I— no.”

“But you’re a witch.”

“So are you.”

“Well, I’m not the one doing it.”

Rey furrows her brow. “Is that— is that a Gifted skill? Is that a spell? Sharing dreams?”

His mouth goes into a flat line. “How do you not know about dream magic?” And he looks like he’s going to say something else, but then Rey inhales sharply and her eyes blink open and she’s lying in

her bed in her dark room, no light but the soft glow of the streetlamps outside filtering through her sheer curtains, and her hands are clutching the blankets.

She sits up. She looks down at her hands, curling and uncurling her fingers. Her hands are still cold, even though they were tangled in the blankets.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a week and a half ‘til Veilnight. Last year, Rey had only just joined Temple Coven in time for the holiday and its ritual, so she had played a small role, supporting the others more than doing much work herself. This year she’s expected to do more, so her lessons with the coven elders are ramping up. Today she has a healing lesson with Maz. It’s not a skill she’ll need for the Veilnight ritual, but it’s a powerful light-work skill, and the more she can build it up, the more she’ll build her Gift.  
  
She’s getting ready to head to the circle, checking her plants, but she’s thinking about Kylo Ren. His low voice, his dark eyes, the broad line of his shoulders. (If her cheeks are a little warm, it’s only because the sun is so bright today, streaming into her living room.) She knows three things about him: his name, that he has a powerful Gift she could feel from all the way outside the forest, and that he does shadow-work far more than she or anyone in Temple Coven does.  
  
Part of her wants so much to call Finn and tell him everything, from the first pulls towards the forest to her first dream to meeting him, finding him, feeling his power in that small moonlit clearing. But her hand hesitates when it closes around her phone in her pocket. If the others in the coven learn about Kylo, about his shadow-work, they might not let her see him again. (At least, they would try. She would find a way. She needs to learn more about him, needs to know why she’s being pulled to him. It has to be for a reason.) And Finn— he would keep her secret, she thinks, but he shouldn’t have to. And maybe, if she’s honest, she doesn’t want anyone else to keep her secret. She wants to keep it herself.  
  
Rey goes to the circle and meets Maz in the cabin, and they spend a couple hours working together. Maz guides her towards what she calls the heart of healing (”If you look deeper, all pain is the same pain. Just scattered in different ways, like fractured light coming out in different colors. But the root of pain is one pain, and the root of healing is one heart.”) and leads Rey to feel the pattern of that heart, how her Gift shifts around her and flows through her hands in a way that Rey feels as something like smooth water, soft green and shimmering, pliable and easy to spread. She lets it build, lets it flow over and around her hands. Maz draws a knife across the heel of her hand in a shallow cut. Rey takes Maz’s hand between hers and gently presses that flowing green magic into the wound. Her hands tingle like they’ve fallen asleep, and after nearly a full minute, the flowing magic slips away. She opens her hands, and Maz’s skin is whole.  
  
“Carry it with you,” Maz tells her. “Learn to feel it always, even when you’re not shaping it.”  
  
So when Rey goes with Kaydel and Paige out further into the hills to gather roots that grow there and dig minerals from the hillside, things they’ll need in bigger quantities for Veilnight, she reaches out for that aspect of her Gift. She tries to focus and for a bit it works — she feels that gentle shimmering power in the folding of the leaves, in the dampness of the soil. It flickers away from her, but she finds it again, in pieces. It smells like trees after rain and makes her smile. It feels so different from the shadow she felt in the forest, in her dreams.  
  
She works with Kaydel and Paige, digging up minerals, sweating and laughing and feigning shock at Paige’s gossip about Poe, who is the resident non-witch friend-of-the-coven Finn’s-ex Paige’s-ex still-their-friend-because-who-could-possibly-give-up-Poe-Dameron. He also happens to be good friends with Jessika, Rey’s old coworker from the bicycle shop, so half the gossip isn’t new to her. But she plays along and grins.  
  
By the time the sun is starting to set, all they have left to gather are the roots that grow at the top of a steep hill. “Shit, I don’t want to climb all the way up there now,” Paige grouses. “It’s almost dark.”  
  
“We could come back tomorrow,” Kaydel says.  
  
“Or,” Rey says, raising her eyebrows, “you two could just make it a lot easier for yourselves.”  
  
Paige and Kaydel grin at each other, set down their bags, and close their eyes.  
  
Rey can’t watch too closely when someone shapeshifts. You can’t quite see it happen — everything goes wobbly and spinny, like vertigo, and then next thing you know they’ve changed, so she spares herself the queasy feeling and just looks away until they’re done. So when she glances back again, two sleek brown foxes are bounding up the hill. She laughs and whoops after them, then catches the roots that they dig up and roll down the hillside to her. She reaches out to feel the Gift around them. It’s sparkling, like tiny bubbles popping in the sunlight; it feels like laughter sounds. Then they scurry back down the hill and change back, dirty but grinning.  
  
“I’ve got to learn how to do that.”  
  
Paige winks at Rey. “You? In no time, I bet.”  
  
Once the supplies are dropped off in the cabin workroom, Rey drives back into the city and straight to Finn’s. She has her own key, and she’s expected, so she lets herself in, smiling before she even gets the door all the way open.  
  
Finn’s place is warm and smells like tomato sauce and garlic, and voices are rising in the kitchen. She stands in the kitchen doorway, and Finn immediately drops the garlic bread and yells her name and rushes over to grab her and pick her up and spin her. Her feet hit the doorframe and Poe calls, “Easy, dumbass,” and Rose is laughing, and Rey grins and hugs Finn with all her might.  
  
They eat spaghetti-and-meatballs and garlic bread and have some beers and play four rounds of Clue. Everything is warm and happy, and for the first time, the shadow and the forest and Kylo Ren all feel far away, truly more like a dream than a reality. This is her reality: her coven, and game nights with her friends, and spaghetti dinners and belly laughs until her cheeks hurt and the rumble of the buses driving by outside.  
  
She hugs them all goodbye when she heads home. Rose squeezes her ‘til she squeaks; Poe kisses both her cheeks with garlic breath. Finn hugs her tight, and she buries her face in his shoulder. The fabric of his jacket is intimately familiar.  
  
She gets home with a happy heart and is in bed and asleep within ten minutes.  
  
If she dreams of anything before she dreams of the forest, she doesn’t remember it. One moment she’s blinking drowsily, drifting off; the next she’s standing in the fog, and Kylo Ren is only a few steps away.  
  
“Why aren’t I afraid of you?” she asks. “Your Gift— it’s all covered in shadow. I’d think I’d be afraid.”  
  
He snorts. “Why would you be afraid of shadow-work?”  
  
Rey doesn’t answer. She feels her cheeks get hot. Maybe she’s revealed too much. She doesn’t know him, doesn’t know anything about him. Even if she’s not scared, she should be careful what she says.  
  
“Last time we dreamed, you didn’t even know about dream magic.” He does that tilt of his head again. “Have you ever worked any shadow?”  
  
He’s strange to look at. He’s tall and broad and long lines and deep darkness, imposing in so many ways. But his mouth is so soft and his hair curls softly away from his face and his eyes, deep and dark though they are, intense though they are, boring into her, have something soft in them, too. It twinges a funny feeling in her chest. “A little divination,” she says. “Badly.”  
  
“You left your cards. In the forest.”  
  
“Oh. Shit. They’re not even mine, they’re—”  
  
She stops herself from saying Leia’s name, but his brow is furrowing anyway. “No shadow-work,” he says. “But divination. And you’ve never even heard of dream magic.”  
  
“Yes, I think we covered that.”  
  
The softness leaves his eyes. They’re all intensity, burning black coals. “You’re from Temple Coven.”  
  
Rey hisses in a breath. She clenches one hand into a fist. “I never said that.”  
  
“You don’t have to.” He scoffs and turns away from her, walking off. The fog starts to swallow him; Rey resists the urge to follow so she doesn’t lose him.  
  
“Why does that—”  
  
But she’s awake now, all of a sudden, blinking and squinting in the morning sunlight that scatters the fog out of her mind. She’s awake, and Kylo is gone.

 

 

 

  
Tonight’s flame-tending shift feels longer than ever. Rey tries to meditate, tries to practice reaching healing magic, tries to do anything except think of Kylo and their dreams, but it’s a spectacular failure. When Finn arrives in the circle at midnight, bearing tupperwares and a thermos, her relief almost makes her woozy with its intensity.  
  
“Rose came over and made mi ga. I made us cocoa for dessert.”  
  
Rey crinkles her nose at him. “They hardly go together.”  
  
“Nope.” He flashes her a grin and passes her a tupperware. It’s hot — he’s just reheated them in the cabin for them.  
  
They slurp down egg noodles and drink the savory broth, relish the chicken and herbs. The night is chilly and crisp, and Rey’s grateful for how the soup warms her down to her toes. It grounds her, Finn grounds her, and they both give her courage for what she’s going to do next.  
  
She lingers for nearly an hour of Finn’s shift, through soup and quiet conversation and cocoa, until he finally playfully pushes her off the log. “Go home. You’ve been here forever.”  
  
“Stay awake,” she says, shouldering her bag. “If you fall asleep, either the fire goes out and the Old Gods are pissed, or it spreads and burns down the whole forest. Either way, bad news.”  
  
“On my honor.”  
  
Rey gets in her car and drives halfway down the hill, making every pretense of leaving. But instead she pulls off the dirt road and parks in the grass next to the trees. She’s taking a chance, but nobody ought to be coming up or down the hill until nearly dawn. She goes a few feet into the trees and then creeps along, keeping the road in sight, winding her way back up the hill. She can see the fire again, burning brightly in the circle; she loops around it, keeping in the shadows, stepping as silently as possible, until she finds the path again. And then she turns and goes deeper into the forest.  
  
With every step further into the trees, her heart beats more surely. The thing pulling inside her reverberates in a way that feels almost satisfied. Her footfalls are sure. And as she follows it, moving in and out of patches of moonlight under the trees, she finally comes to the clearing.  
  
Kylo is sitting on a rickety old fold-out chair, the kind with a woven plastic seat, and the juxtaposition makes her pause. He looks up from his lap — from a length of cord, she sees, that he’s been tying into a series of knots and loops — and raises an eyebrow at her. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back.”  
  
“I need to get the cards. Unless you threw them away.”  
  
“Why would I throw them away?” He gets up and goes to the altar made of piled stones, reaching under it and bringing out the tarot deck. “Here.” He holds it out but doesn’t move towards her.  
  
Rey presses her lips together hard and steps a little closer until she can take the deck. Her fingertips brush his palm and her heart leaps; she hears him take in a hiss of a breath. “Thank you.” She holds the deck to her chest. It’s cold through the knit of her sweater. “What— what were you making?”  
  
“Knot magic.”  
  
She squints at him. “I know it’s knot magic. But what’s it for?”  
  
Kylo moves to sit back in his chair, then stops. He leans against a tree instead, crossing his arms and staring back at her. “It’s sympathetic magic. I’ll make it into a figure, once I’ve worked in the spell knots. It represents the target of the spell.”  
  
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”  
  
“That’s because sympathetic magic is shadow-work. Temple Coven wouldn’t have taught you that.”  
  
There’s no mistaking the pure derision dripping from his voice when he names her coven. Rey finds herself bristling, and so, just to be snotty, says, “Are you going to curse someone with it, then?”  
  
Kylo turns to her, all the intensity back in his face. “That’s the problem with those people,” he says, nearly seethes. “Shadow-work doesn’t always harm. Just like light-work doesn’t always help. It’s not that simple. Nothing is that simple.” He turns, paces away. He runs a hand through his hair; it settles back around his face. “Banishing is shadow-work. Is it harmful, then, to banish a spirit that’s wreaking havoc in someone’s home?”  
  
Rey’s arms are crossed, now. The tarot deck is under one arm, pressing hard into her ribs. “You can do an uncrossing for that. I do it all the time.”  
  
“They’re not the same thing. Uncross where you should banish and you’ve only done half the job.” He shakes his head at her. “That’s why you need both. The Old Gods worked both the light and the shadow. You need both.” The restless irritation seems to settle, to dissipate, like fog breaking up in the morning. Kylo steps in closer. Rey isn’t short, but he still looms over her; it pinches her neck to stare up at him too long, but she doesn’t look away. “You’re overflowing with Gift,” he says, and his voice is softer now. “You’re barely scraping the surface of it, I can tell. You could do so much more. You could be so much more.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his hand twitch at his side. “You need a teacher.”  
  
Something grows in her chest, presses up into the back of her tongue, words she could say. But instead she takes a deep breath and says, “I have teachers,” and she steps around him and walks past him.  
  
But she doesn’t leave the clearing. Instead she sits on the ground near his altar, setting her backpack and the cards to the side. She looks up at him over her shoulder, expectantly. After a moment Kylo smiles (it makes his intense face soften, go gentler, grow warmer), and he comes over and sits across from her. “So why are we sharing dreams?”  
  
Kylo shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m not doing the magic, and you don’t know how.”  
  
“Is it—” She glances away. In the darkness of the night, even with the moonlight here in the clearing, she wonders how well he can read her face. “Does it have to be a spell, exactly?”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
Rey searches for her words, idly digging at the dirt with a stick. “Magic is everywhere. It doesn’t need a witch to work it through a spell to exist. Could it be— could it be just magic working on its own?”  
  
He stays quiet for a moment. “I don’t know. Possibly.”  
  
A small grin tugs the corner of her mouth. “Ah, so you don’t know everything.”  
  
“I never said I did.” When she glances up at him, she sees that he’s smiling— a true smile now, wide and easy, and it lights up his entire face in a way she hadn’t thought possible. Her fingers close tighter around the stick.  
  
She isn’t sure how long she stays, sitting in the dark with Kylo Ren, talking about magic. It’s mostly magic they discuss, nothing too personal— though in some ways, for a witch, magic is the most personal thing there is. They don’t touch, but his knees are no more than ten inches from hers; she is very aware of this.  
  
It’s only after she yawns for perhaps the dozenth time that Kylo says, “Shouldn’t you get home?”  
  
“I don’t—” want to leave, she thinks. But she stops herself from saying it. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I should.” She stands slowly, stretching her legs, yawning again. She feels him watching her and looks over.  
  
“You live in the city?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
He’s hesitating over something. “Are you alert enough to drive back? Did you drive?”  
  
Rey smiles. “I did. I think I can manage.”  
  
“Still—” Kylo glances up for a moment; the starlight reflects in his eyes. “Let me help you, Rey,” he says, suddenly.  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“An enchantment. A small one. To make sure you stay alert until you’re home.” She stares at him, hard. He stares back. His gaze is unflinching, but his mouth moves like there are words he’s swallowing back. “It won’t hurt you.”  
  
“It’s shadow-work,” she says, simply.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
She thinks of Maz and her healing lessons, of Rose, who can already heal so well. Of Paige and Kaydel shapeshifting like laughter. Of Finn’s protection, warm and close. Of Leia reading the bones, the tea leaves, the cards. Of Luke, full of power, who is said to be so good at enchantments.  
  
She takes a deep breath. “Okay.”  
  
Kylo’s shoulders relax. He reaches out, not quite touching her, his hands splayed a few inches to either side of her arms. His eyes flutter closed, and Rey lets hers fall closed, too. She breathes, and she finds her center, and she reaches out with her Gift.  
  
It’s a little like smoke. Purplish smoke, curling around her. It’s light, subtle. It feels— not friendly, exactly. But something close to that.  
  
She blinks. She’s quite awake.  
  
Kylo stares back at her. He swallows, visibly. “It took. It should lift once you cross your threshold.”  
  
“And if it doesn’t?” Rey arches one eyebrow at him. Almost playfully, she realizes.  
  
His smile comes back, the small one. “Then whenever it does pass, you can yell at me in our dream.”  
  
Those words — _our dream_ — thrum something deep within her. Rey pulls the straps of her backpack more firmly on her shoulders. “Right. Well, thanks. I’ll— see you.” And before he can answer, she turns and plunges back into the depths of the forest.  
  
It takes time, again, to creep back near the edge, but not so close Finn will see her, to curve around the circle and down the hill to her car. But she makes it, easily, awake and present and focused. She’s far enough down the hill that Finn shouldn’t hear her engine start, and she drives home without incident. The dashboard clock reads four o’clock.  
  
True to Kylo’s word, the enchantment lifts as soon as Rey is inside her apartment. Sleepiness settles over her heavily, so she locks the door and shuffles into the kitchen. It’s only been a few hours since the soup, but her stomach is croaking again already. She tiredly eats peanut butter smeared on a slice of bread, and as soon as her hunger is calmed, the weariness sits even more heavily on her. She ends up falling into bed without even brushing her teeth and sleeps deep and hard and dreamless.

 

 

 

  
The next two days pass in a blur. The days are filled with a few cleansings, a protection lesson with Luke, a divination lesson with Leia. Luke likes to have her meditate for a solid hour before beginning the lesson proper (”Your Gift is within you,” he says; “If you can’t find it, feel it, and know it, you can’t possibly work the spells”), which is still hard for Rey and inevitably leaves her at least a little cross and makes the actual spellwork that much more difficult. Leia doesn’t worry about meditation as much. “Divination can’t be grasped too tightly,” she says, turning over cards. (They’re still on cards because supposedly they’re the easiest to learn; Rey feels like she’d rather read the bones, frankly, but she lets Leia lead. She couldn’t bend Leia’s will if she wanted to.) “You have to let it flow through you. You’re a conduit for it, not the wielder of it.”  
  
The nights are filled with dreams of Kylo.  
  
Even in their dreams, when he’s not really there, he feels so close it makes her heart beat faster. The first night he smiles at her across the fog. “Did it work?”  
  
“It did. Maybe a little too well. I was more tired than I should have been, once it let up.”  
  
“Was that your first spell hangover?”  
  
She laughs. “No. My first ritual had me in bed most of the next day.”  
  
“Then I’ll count it a success.” He smiles at her, and she’s trying to think of what to say when she wakes up all too soon.  
  
The second night, after her lesson with Leia, the dream is different. Instead of just standing across from each other in the foggy forest, she’s sitting in a circle of stones. Kylo sits across from her, and there’s a bag of casting bones in her hand.  
  
“Do you know how to use those?”  
  
Rey shakes her head. “I told you. I’m terrible at divination.”  
  
His eyes burn into her. “Do you want me to teach you?”  
  
She stares back. She can hear her breath, and his, and the rush of her blood in her ears. Her hands are cold. She reaches out, holding the bag. Kylo takes it carefully, his fingers never touching hers, and something about it makes her chest ache. He doesn’t look away from her as he shakes the bag, or as he spills the bones onto the earth. “Don’t think about it too hard,” he says. “Just cast them. When you read, don’t think about what the different shapes are supposed to mean. Let it flow through you. Let it tell you what’s there instead of searching for it.”  
  
That’s what Leia had told her. But she doesn’t say that. She silently gathers the bones up again, puts them back in the bag. Her heart beats steadily as she holds his gaze, shakes the bag, and casts the bones. Breaking eye contact to read them almost hurts, but she does it.  
  
His voice is barely more than a whisper, is like a forest wind, like a hidden stream, like a shadow. “What do you see?”  
  
Rey can feel it, a little. Like the tingle when part of your body falls asleep, as it wakes back up, blood moving again, setting your nerves all electric. It tingles behind her eyes, behind her lips, and starts to creep down through her throat and shoulders. She sits back suddenly, breathes in sharply, and the feeling leaves her. “Nothing,” she says. “I almost started to, I think. But I stopped it.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“I—”  
  
But she wakes up. Lying on her back, staring straight up at her ceiling, one of her spider plants just in her line of vision. Alone in her bedroom, her alarm blaring. She has to go tend the flame.  
  
It’s Saturday, and by the time her morning shift (too long, restless, the pull from the forest overwhelming) finishes and Leia relieves her, the cabin and circle are crawling with other coven members. Veilnight is just less than a week away, and everyone is trying to get preparations done now so they can spend the last few days before it gathering their strength and sleeping as much as they can. It’s too much. She helps Rose and Finn weave braids of rosemary and grass, but as soon as that’s done, she heads home. The evening stretches too long. She watches a movie, makes a grilled cheese, drinks too many cups of tea, gives an offering at her altar. But she’s fidgety and distracted, even more after the sun sets. She waits until nearly ten before she drives back out to the circle.  
  
Paige is tending the flame. Rey passes her with her backpack on. When Paige looks quizzical, Rey says, “Going to gather oak leaves,” and Paige just nods and waves her on. Perfectly orange oak leaves gathered under moonlight are especially potent in prosperity spells, which they’ll be needing. It’s the perfect excuse.  
  
She doesn’t stop to look for leaves. She goes straight into the depths of the forest until she steps into Kylo’s clearing. Then she stops and feels her heart sink so fast it makes her sick. He isn’t there.  
  
The clearing is empty; the censer on the stone altar isn’t smoking. Rey turns, confused. He’s always here. Well, not always— he has a home, somewhere. (He’s only told her that his coven is on the other side of the forest, which is quite a ways.) But every time she follows the pull here, he’s met her.  
  
Except this time. Rey sits in the old fold-out chair, staring at her hands. She shouldn’t feel this lonely. But it yawns open inside her, filling her up ‘til she can hardly see anything else.  
  
Then she hears the undergrowth rustle. Her head snaps up and then he’s there, emerging into the moonlight. “You beat me here,” he says at the same time she says, “You came.”  
  
Kylo raises his eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t I come? I felt it, too. I always feel it.”  
  
Rey wants to jump up and throw her arms around him. Instead she grips the arms of the chair. “I thought— I thought maybe you wouldn’t come back, this time.”  
  
“Again, why wouldn’t I?”  
  
She takes a slow breath. Decides if she wants to go there. “I have kind of a complex. About people not coming back.”  
  
“Shitty boyfriends?”  
  
He says it like a joke, but it doesn’t make her feel better. “My parents,” she says, and her voice is thin in the pale moonlight.  
  
Kylo’s face crumples. “What happened?”  
  
“That’s all. They just— didn’t come back.”  
  
And then his face darkens. He kneels down in front of her, his eyes full of that intensity. “Then they’re idiots.”  
  
“Please don’t.”  
  
“If they could have come back, but just didn’t, then they’re idiots.” He searches her face. “Are you okay? Should I shut up?”  
  
Rey takes a shaky breath and shakes her head. “I don’t really want to talk about it. But I also don’t want you to shut up.”  
  
That makes him smile, and he sits on a half-decaying log near her. He doesn’t say anything for a while, just sort of watches her, his face soft. The wind shivers through the leaves above them; a few fall, spiraling down red and brown and yellow.  
  
“You know,” she says, “I said I _don’t_ want you to shut up.”  
  
Kylo laughs, a full, genuine laugh instead of his usual smirks. It’s like— it’s like— she doesn’t even know what it’s like, but it makes her heart so full and happy she can hardly stand it. Like spaghetti dinner nights.  
  
But he still doesn’t say anything. When his laughter dies off into a grin, which fades into a small smile, he just keeps watching her.  
  
And she understands. She gets it. She feels it, too. The thing in her that’s been pulling her to the forest hasn’t stopped pulling just because she’s near him. It’s still there, magnetic, gravitational. Her Gift, she realizes, rising and swelling and reaching for him. For his Gift.  
  
She can feel his power, the immensity of it, even just sitting here with him. It’s palpable. It’s that almost-friendly smoke of the enchantment, and it’s something like the deepest parts of water, and it’s something like the sharp crack of ice on top of snow under your boot at midnight in a frozen field. It’s like no magic she’s ever felt before.  
  
And so they don’t speak, for a time. She stares into his eyes and he stares into hers and they sit in silence and feel their Gifts reaching for each other.  
  
“What does mine feel like?” Her voice is scarcely above a whisper when she asks.  
  
Kylo’s eyes flutter closed. “Like sunlight,” he says. “The colors of dawn, and the golden hour, and the haze of dusk. Like skinning your knee when you fall because you ran down the hill too fast. Like a plant turning towards the light.”  
  
Her face is burning and her fingers twine together restlessly in her lap until her knuckles hurt. “Yours is like fog,” she says. Her breath is making fog in the air, just barely. “Like— warm breath on cold nights. And deep water, and deep forests, and how it feels when you miss a step on the stairs and for a second you think you’re going to fall.”  
  
She doesn’t miss his own cheeks turning pink, more than the chill of the night would do. “You have that too, you know. The shadow.”  
  
Rey finally lets her gaze fall from his. She shrugs. “Everyone does. Everything.”  
  
“Rey.” She can’t not look back up at him when he says her name. “You’re only using half your power. Do you have any idea how much more incredible you’d be if you just let yourself?”  
  
The look in his eyes is hurting her heart. “I belong to a coven,” she says. “They have a way of doing things. I can’t turn my back on them.”  
  
For a moment he looks— angry. Strangely angry, and she almost says something, but before she can, his face falls and he shakes his head and looks away, and now he just looks sad. “There’s so much I could teach you. So much more, if you’d just let me.”  
  
“You taught me about reading the bones.” She makes her voice lighter than she feels.  
  
It earns her the smallest of smirks. “In the dream. Not out here. If you ever change your mind— tell me. I’ll teach you anything. Everything.”  
  
It’s hard to think straight when he looks at her like that. So she only says, “Maybe.”  
  
They don’t talk nearly as long as she wants to. (They’ve never talked as long as she wants to.) It’s more talk of magic — her cleansings-for-hire, his offerings here at his private altar. Eventually she’s leaning forward, elbows on her knees, and he’s doing the same, until their heads are close enough together that she could reach out and touch his face easily. She doesn’t; she twists her fingers in the fabric of her sweater instead. But she could.  
  
It’s Kylo this time who leaves first. “I want to keep talking,” he admits, glancing away. “But it’s been a long day. I should at least try to sleep.”  
  
“Can I do anything for you? Help you get home safe like you did for me?”  
  
He smirks. “You can’t do enchantments yet.”  
  
The _yet_ hangs between them. She doesn’t touch it. “But I could do something.”  
  
His smirk softens into a warm smile. Something in his eyes goes so gentle that she bites her lip against the flutter in her chest. “And what would you do for me, Rey?”  
  
“A blessing,” she offers. “A protection spell. Good luck.”  
  
She would say she can’t read his eyes, but the truth is, she can. She can read everything happening in them when he looks at her now, and it’s too much, and so she won’t name it, even though it’s singing under her skin, too. “A blessing, then.”  
  
Rey nods. She takes a deep breath. She closes her eyes, and she reaches for her Gift.  
  
Blessings are like breathing against a cold window, fogging it up, and then drawing things in it, and a little like dewdrops clinging to spiderwebs. She feels for that pattern, that vibration. She threads it through her will, weaves it around herself. Into it she loops Kylo is safe, Kylo is well, Kylo’s sleep will leave him refreshed and happy. It’s a simple thing that she weaves together, with her will, her breath, her gift, a simple blessing she writes in the fog on the window; but she feels the power thrumming through it. Her power. From deep in the core of her. And when she settles the blessing over him (as if there were a cloud in her hands and she blows onto it, breathes it forward, so it drifts and settles gently on his head and shoulders), she meets his gaze. It’s so warm and _vulnerable_ that her heart squeezes and her breath catches.  
  
“Well then.” He’s staring at her like she’s— like she’s— (she can’t bear to think it, but she feels it, too, in her bones she feels it, too) and he just says, “Goodnight, Rey.” And he turns away like it’s the hardest thing, and he walks off into the trees. Rey’s heart is pounding and her fingertips are still tingling with magic when he pauses a couple feet into the trees, deep in the shadow, and looks back at her, and smiles, and then continues on his way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading so far! We're at the halfway point and I'm not gonna lie, though this chapter is shorter than the others so far, it's prooooobably my favorite. Enjoy!

Sunday is a blur. There are more preparations, and Finn brings her a burrito the size of her head to the cabin to power her through the day, but it’s not— not what she expected. All of it, the Veilnight work, it feels off. She knows it’s because she’s distracted. She knows she’s distracted. Finn watches her sorting apples, her burrito half-eaten when she normally would’ve inhaled it by now in its entirety, and sort of squints at her.

“What?” She squints back at him over her tea mug when she takes a sip.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Finn.”

“Come on, Rey.”

She bites her lip. She considers. But she can’t. Not now. “I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping much lately.” It’s not a lie.

“Well, try to get some extra the next few nights. Veilnight’s gonna drain you.”

“You think so little of me.” Her tone is playful, but she throws in a waggle of her eyebrows to make sure it comes across.

He grins. “You haven’t done Veilnight ritual before. There’s a reason we’re all going to just sleep here.”

Rey returns the smile, eats another fourth of her burrito, and then goes back to the apples. They’re for the Veilnight divination. Leia letting her pick the ones to use is a huge sign of trust, considering how poorly Rey’s done with divination so far.

Divination. The only shadow-work she’s been allowed to get anywhere near. She remembers Kylo Ren spilling the bones across the earth in her dream. She remembers that tingling behind her eyes, her lips. And so she reaches for it now, in the waking world; she reaches for that thing she felt on him, that sense of stepping on ice-crusted snow. Something in her gives a crack, and her fingers scramble and press against the hard shiny flesh of one apple.

She inhales sharply. It smells like snow and the fog in the forest at midnight.

Rey sets the apple to the side. She keeps going and finds two more, her fingers seeking them easily once she lets herself. Three apples total for Leia, who is so much deeper in divination, to choose from for the ritual.

Something deep inside her is stirring. She blinks, as if to blink away dust motes, but nothing is there. Finn is watching her again, puzzling at her.

“I think I’m getting a little better at divination,” is all she says, and he smiles, his face clearing.

She passes the day by keeping herself busy. First the Veilnight preparations, not as crowded as Saturday’s, only herself and Finn and Kaydel and Maz, but enough work to go around, enough cups of tea to keep her running. Then she has to get groceries because she’s scraping down to nothing but half-stale cereal and half a jar of peanut butter; she doesn’t have the presence of mind to plan her meals for the week (a habit she’s ingrained in herself to avoid wasting food because she can’t bear to), so she gets the basics, rice and proteins and vegetables that she knows combine well so she can throw together meals without thinking. Then she cleans her apartment, more thoroughly than she really needs to, mostly for something to do. She scrubs the bathtub and vacuums and checks all her plants again even though she did this morning; she cleans the stove and rearranges her altar to the Old Gods, pausing to anoint them with the holy water again even though she already did this morning because frankly she needs all the help they can give her right now.

Eventually, bedtime creeps closer. Rey drinks a cup of chamomile tea in hopes it’ll soothe her jangling nerves enough to let her sleep. (In hopes it brings her good luck.) When she goes to bed, she breathes deliberately slowly, like in meditation, willing her body and mind to unwind and sleep.

And then she’s there, finally, deep in sleep, and she finds him. In the forest full of fog, a full moon gleaming overhead, she finds Kylo Ren.

They sit across from one another on the cold ground. His hands are on his knees, and his knees are scant inches from hers. Is it possible for her heart to be in her mouth and in her stomach at the same time? It must be, because it is. She watches his breath make clouds in the air. She opens her lips to speak.

“I didn’t want you to go.” And she feels it, when she says that. Almost more than when she told him about her parents. (Because she didn’t tell him everything, then. But this. This is everything.) Her shell cracking open, her heart exposed. It hurts, and it’s beautiful, and it makes her head light.

“I didn’t want to leave. Rey.” His eyes, gorgeous and dark in the moonlight, flicker across her face. “Your blessing. It was…”

“Did it work?”

He swallows. He nods. “Perfectly. You— your magic. Your Gift. It’s beautiful.”

The moment he says it, his ears turn red. But he doesn’t have to embarrassed. Not with her. “Hey. It’s me. You don’t have to— I feel it too, remember?” She feels her cheeks flush, though. “And yours— I felt it. Doing divination today, I felt something like what I can feel from you. And it was beautiful.”

He looks so small, somehow, with his huge frame. Afraid and uncertain. So Rey holds out her hand.

Kylo looks at her hand. She always hears his breath in their dreams (and her own breath, and the blood in her ears) but now she swears, she swears, she swears she hears his heartbeat. It speeds up, and he flexes his fingers, and he lifts his own hand.

His reaching toward her is forever. Something is suspended, that magnetism, that gravity; it’s suspended between them, and Rey feels it pulling taut the closer his hand comes to hers. Has her heart ever beat quite like this? Has her skin ever been so singing, so alive? Has her Gift ever risen in her chest and pressed the breath right out of her?

She reaches for him, and he reaches for her, and their fingers meet.

Rey gasps, lips parting, eyes stinging. Kylo’s soft lips part, too, his eyes going so tender it makes her cry. His chest heaves, and he doesn’t reach to wipe her tears (though he could, he could, he’s so so close), but he does press his palm to hers, twining his fingers between hers. His hand is so big and sure, and it’s so cold in this forest in this dream in this night, so his hand is cold, but she feels the pulse beat in his palm, and hers sings along with it, and it’s everything, everything—

When she wakes up, her cheeks are wet. It’s still dark; the clock reads five in the morning. Her hand flexes of its own accord.

By the time she gets herself together and drives to the circle, it’s half past six. The sky is still dark, but the birds are singing. Rey parks halfway up the hill again. It’s more of a risk, now; Paige had the overnight shift, and if she lingered too much, she’ll pass Rey. But Rey doesn’t care, and she doesn’t see Paige. She creeps through the forest with her things in tow, skirting around the circle and the fire pit where Luke is tending the flame. Her pulse quickens and skin prickles when she passes his line of sight, but she’s deep in the trees, and he doesn’t see her.

Kylo is waiting for her in his clearing, like she knew he would be. It’s colder this morning than yesterday, and he has a thick, dark grey scarf wound around his throat. His hands are in his pockets and he doesn’t say anything when she steps into the clearing. She sees his mouth and jaw move the way they do sometimes, like he’s holding back words.

Rey smiles and holds up the two paper cups. “I brought us tea.”

And then his face breaks into a smile, one of his true bright smiles, and there’s no way she could be cold when he’s smiling at her like that.

They sit on the chair and the log, and they drink the tea, and they eat the waffles and bacon she brought wrapped up in her backpack. (”Just freezer waffles,” she tells him, “and I microwaved the bacon.” He shakes his head, swallows a mouthful, and says, “Still excellent.”) The forest is still dark around them, only starlight giving any illumination, but there’s enough open sky here that she can see him, and she can see the way he watches her. She can still feel his fingers intertwined with hers, even though they’re not touching now; it’s still making her heart beat harder.

“That looks hand-knit,” she says over her cup of tea. “That scarf. Did you make it?”

Kylo’s face clouds, his smile disappearing. “No,” he says, and that’s all.

Her chest twinges. “Is it hand-made, though?” He nods, flexing his hands. “Was it a gift?”

“My mother made it.” His voice is tight, and he doesn’t meet her eyes.

His tone is enough to tell her not to push it, but she can’t help it. She has to, even if only a little. “Are you close?”

She already knows the answer, from the tightness that’s come into his shoulders, the flatness of his tone. So when he says, “No,” and nothing more, she finally lets it drop, even though she doesn’t want to, even though she wants to say _If she loved you enough to make you that scarf, why didn’t you keep her close?_ But instead she finishes drinking her tea, and she waits. Because everything is still humming in the air between them, even after that, and she doesn’t dare do a thing to break it.

“Tonight,” he says, after a while. “When I woke up from the dream.” He finally looks at her again. “I missed you.”

Rey bites her lip. “I missed you, too.”

She starts to clean up from their breakfast, for something to do to keep her from— from— Kylo helps her. She doesn’t need the help, there’s so little to do, but it’s sweet. It makes her smile.

When she’s tying off the small grocery bag she brought to carry their plates and things home again, her hat catches on a branch and gets pulled askew on her head. She sighs, but when she straightens up, before she can fix it, Kylo’s hand is there. Rey doesn’t know when he got quite so close to her. His hand presses gently against the side of her head and pulls the hat back into place. “There,” he says. He’s gazing into her face but not quite meeting her eyes. Every inch of her skin feels awake. Then he takes in a sharp breath and steps back and leans against another tree.

Rey draws a shaky breath of her own. “The birds are getting louder,” she says. “It’ll be morning soon.”

“Technically it’s already morning.”

She crinkles up her nose at him. “Then it’ll be daylight soon, Mister Technicality.”

He smirks at her. “We could give the morning devotion to the Old Gods together.”

“You do the morning devotion?”

“Of course. Just because I do shadow-work more than light-work doesn’t mean— Rey, I’ve explained this.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” She looks over at his stone altar. It’s simply arranged: two statuettes, a cup full of some kind of berries, a shallow dish with a bit of water in it. It’s all he really needs. “Are you here often, in the mornings?”

“Not always. Sometimes.” He shifts his weight against the tree. “Sometimes I want to get away from my coven.”

“I’ve wondered why you come all the way out here to work, if you’re clear on the other side of the forest. This is much closer to my side.”

“It’s—” He sighs and runs his hand through his hair. Rey’s stomach flutters at the way it falls back around his face. “Shadow-work is often best done alone. It requires a certain kind of focus, a different kind than light-work. And there are people in my coven who make it… hard to focus.”

Rey watches his face as he speaks. “Why are you in that coven if you don’t like the people?”

“I never said—”

“You didn’t have to.”

Something soft comes into his face when she says that. She feels the distance between them, or the lack of it, all the more clearly for it. “It’s where I belong,” he finally says. “But that doesn’t mean everyone there understands me. Or even likes me.”

“I like you.”

She didn’t even think before saying it, but the way his eyes light up make it worth the flash of embarrassment. “I know,” he says, half a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. But it fades. “You’re pretty much the only one.”

Wrapping her arms around herself, Rey glances down and scuffs her boot against the ground. “My coven likes me,” she says. “But sometimes…” She sniffs. Her nose is cold. “When I first joined, one of my mentors was trying to teach me to tap into my Gift. I dipped into shadow without realizing it. He was— he seemed almost scared of me.” She remembers Luke’s eyes wide, his mouth drawn flat, the bitterness in his tone when he told Leia she would have to teach Rey. “It’s been tense with him ever since. It made me feel…” She shakes her head. “Like something was wrong with me. With my Gift.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Rey.”

Her eyes are stinging hot. She blinks hard. “And now it’s coming true. Now I can feel it. The shadow. And I can tell it’s always been there, inside me. But now it’s waking up. My best friend, he’s noticing. But I can’t tell him. Because we’re not supposed to work shadow. But it’s— when I feel it in you, it’s— I want—” Rey digs her fingers into her elbows. “It makes me feel so alone.”

“Rey.” His voice is low, a rumble that warms her chest. She looks up and sees him staring at her in that way only he can, that way that’s everything, everything. “You’re not alone.”

Every inch of her means it when she holds his gaze and says, “Neither are you.”

He’s breathing harder than he ought to be from leaning against a tree. But he’s not leaning anymore. Kylo steps closer. Dawn is coming, the sky is washing lighter, and Rey realizes she’s only seen him in moonlight before. His eyes aren’t quite the dark pools she thought. There’s a honey-warmth to the brown of them that she’s seeing for the first time as the forest grows brighter around them. Fog is rising off the damp cool ground, and her hands are shaking.

“Your hands,” he says, rumbling low. He’s so close she could lean her head against his chest. She’s trembling under her skin. Something is about to break, and she thinks it’s something she wants to break. The magnetism. The gravity.

“It’s cold.” Her voice is scarcely more than a whisper.

“I know.”

His head bends lower. Rey’s heart pounds, her skin sparks, her lips part, and when he stops and hovers so close she can feel his breath rush on her cheek, she feels everything balancing on the head of a pin. “I know,” she says, too, her lips almost brushing against his, and she isn’t even sure which thing she means, there’s so much. And it’s too much, she can’t pretend anymore, and she lifts her hands and takes hold of his face and closes the gap and kisses him.

How can one simple act make her legs lose strength, make her heart spiral wild up out of her chest, make her fingers curl into his hair and her breath catch and a small noise escape her against his mouth and— Kylo is kissing her back, softly at first, his hands hovering scant inches from her hips. So she leans into him, and the tension slips out of him, his hands land on her hips, pull her against him, and slide around to her waist, her back. He parts his lips against hers and kisses her hard, now, her head spinning as his fingers dig into her back and his tongue finds hers. He tastes like the deepest part of the ocean and secrets in the dark and missing a step on the stairs and a candle flame guttering in a draft and sunlight shifting on water and golden threads weaving around her and his mouth moves from hers and travels across her cheek, her jaw, her neck, his breath and his murmurs of “Rey, _Rey_ ” pressing into her skin, she can hardly breathe, can only fist her hands in his hair and shiver under his touch and when he kisses her mouth again it’s the sweetest, deepest thing she’s ever tasted.

She’s still shaking when they draw back. She rests her forehead against his, her breath rushing against his. Her fingers stroke through his hair like she’s longed to do for days. Is it only days? It feels like years, like ages that she’s been holding back. But now— “Kylo,” she whispers, and she feels and hears the shudder in his breath.

It goes beyond her body and desire, her heart and her feelings. They would be enough, but it goes beyond them into the core of her, into her Gift. It’s glowing, rising, meeting his and stirring together. When she kissed him, she could feel the depth of the shadow in him. It’s part of why she’s still shaking. It scares her, a little.

But not enough to scare her away. Because she felt the light there, too.

Kylo strokes her cheeks with his thumbs, then tips up her head and kisses her forehead. His lips linger there, and Rey’s hands slide down to bury themselves in the warmth of his scarf, and she didn’t know her heart could feel this way.

She leans back to look into his eyes, and gods, the way he’s looking at her is everything, is beyond. Like she is everything. Like he tasted the light and the shadow in her, too. But the sun is coming up, and it’s going to be harder to sneak away the longer she stays, and Luke is perhaps the last person in the coven she wants to discover her sneaking around. Plus she has a flame-tending shift tonight, and she can feel in her body that she needs to nap before then.

“Can I see you again tonight?” Her hands rest against his chest as she asks.

Kylo closes his eyes; she sees the tension come into the corners of them. “I can’t. If I could, Rey— but I have to be in our circle.”

“It’s okay.” She presses up on her toes, and he bows his head to meet her as though he’s done it a thousand times when she kisses him again, slow and warm. “Maybe I’ll see you while we sleep,” she murmurs.

“I hope so.” He cradles her face in his hands, and Rey had no idea she could love the feeling of that simple thing so much. “I hope so.”

Leaving him in the forest is harder than ever by far. “Good night,” she says. “Or good morning. You know what I mean.”

He’s smiling his soft smile. “Thank you for tea. And breakfast.”

She grins at him. “Only for those?”

And his smile spreads, like she hoped it would. “For everything.” The sun is angling golden into the clearing, making his eyes glow warm. He looks beautiful in the morning light. It takes all of Rey’s willpower to leave the clearing and make her way back to her car, but she does it, her lips and hands still warm.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to chapter four, in which we earn our T rating, and in which my always excessive use of em dashes crosses the line into gratuitous. (I would apologize, but am I really sorry? ... Maybe a little. I hope you enjoy anyway!)

Rey had forgotten. Yesterday, when Finn brought her the burrito and they prepped for Veilnight together, she’d promised to have him and Rose over for an early dinner before her shift. She squeezes in a nap but wakes up feeling blurry and more tired than she did before she slept, and it takes her longer than it should have to figure out what to make.

But she greets them when they get there with smiles and hugs and plates full of fried eggs on top of rice and tomatoes and spinach folded in until it wilted, with various bottles of hot sauces and chili pastes to slather on top.

They eat and laugh and Rey tucks her feet underneath her on the couch and asks, “So what exactly is Veilnight like?”

“You were there for the ritual last year,” Finn says.

“Yeah, but what’s it really like? To be part of it?”

Rose’s eyes gleam. “You can feel it even in the city. All the spirits getting too close. People are jumpy, but they don’t know why. And then when you get to the circle, you can feel them everywhere.”

“The bonfire is a beacon for them,” Finn says. “So they’re always all over the circle, but on Veilnight there’s more of them trying to get through.”

“The ritual can be overwhelming. There’s a bunch of different kinds of magic happening at once. But if you focus on your role, it goes okay.” Rose smiles. “At the end of the day, Luke and Leia and Maz can hold it together if some of us slip up. We don’t really, though. Paige and Kaydel have been doing this for years, and Finn and I hold it together really well too, if I say so myself. You’re gonna do fine, Rey.”

Rey thinks about the forest at night, how silent it is. She imagines creeping through it, surrounded by spirits pressing against the veil between their world and hers. She imagines Kylo’s clearing full of ghosts, a whirlwind of shadow and light, and finding him there.

“And everyone sleeps at the cabin after?”

“It’s the heaviest ritual of the year. Everyone’s too wiped to get home. Trust me.”

“It’s fun, though. Leia has us over to her place the next morning for brunch. You haven’t seen her house yet, have you, Rey? It’s really something.”

Rey smirks a little. “Huge?”

Rose snorts. “No. Leia’s not— ostentatious. But it’s nice. Probably the cleanest place I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Rey meets Finn’s gaze. “I’m excited. I think it’s gonna be good.”

Her shift passes in a blur, and when it’s done, she heads home. Kylo had said he couldn’t come to the forest, and Veilnight preparations are done. (”All that’s left is for you to sleep,” Kaydel had said, in her no-nonsense but not unkind way, when she’d relieved Rey. “Seriously, Rey, you’ve got bags under your eyes. Get some sleep before Thursday or you’ll hate yourself.”) There’s nothing more to keep her from her own home and her own bed, so she returns to them.

When she wakes on Tuesday morning, she realizes she didn’t dream with Kylo, and her heart sinks a little.

But there’s things to do today. She has cleansing and blessings booked (everyone had advised her against it, so close to Veilnight, but she has to keep herself busy, and cleansings in particular come so easily to her that she doesn’t think they’ll drain her too much). They fill her day, but not her mind; any time she’s not actively in the middle of washing cleansings over places like ocean waves pulling back across the sand, her mind turns to the forest, to Kylo. To his eyes, his soft mouth, his soft hair, the tension in his shoulders and face when he’d mentioned his mother, the tiniest break in his voice when he talked about his coven, the way his face lights up when he grins, his hands on her back, his lips against hers, on her neck, and she has to take care to keep her breathing steady.

Is she being too impulsive? She’s only known him, been dreaming with him, barely more than a week. But she was being pulled to him before that, her Gift rising to meet his. And they’re sharing dreams for a reason, even if they don’t know what the reason is. And nobody has ever looked at her the way he does, like she’s the only thing he can see. If she’s being impulsive, she doesn’t care.

She knows the fact that she’d hiding him from Finn, and from everyone else, suggests— but there are reasons for that. Temple is so strict about shadow-work. It’s better, for now, to keep her secrets. And it’s true that Kylo is steeped in shadow, but she thinks that’s part of what drew her Gift to his. They complement each other, shadow and light. They balance. And isn’t that the purpose of magic? Isn’t that the duty of the witch, following the path of the Old Gods? To find the balance of the Gift, within the self and out in the world?

And besides, he’s not only shadow. When she kissed him, when she felt him, she had felt the light in him, too, so warm and bright, shifting beneath the shadow. He wakes up something in her. She can’t possibly give this up.

When she’s finally in bed, relaxing her body for sleep, she holds hope in her heart until unconsciousness pulls her down.

And then she’s there, in the forest with him, fog around them and moonlight above. Kylo smiles when he sees her. “What, no waffles?”

Rey laughs. The sound doubles back to her, bouncing off the trees, in a way it wouldn’t in the waking world. “Maybe next time, if the dream will give me a toaster.”

His face goes still. He steps closer to her and reaches out. His fingers brush her cheek, just barely, and Rey’s breath catches. The way he’s looking at her is almost a question, almost searching. “I would have breakfast with you,” he says, and it’s not really a complete thought, and it sounds like something he’s wondering rather than telling her. “Where did you come from? How did you find me? Why?”

Rey reaches up and touches his wrist, lightly at first, but then closes her fingers around his arm. He doesn’t look away from her eyes. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t know why I felt pulled to you. I don’t know why our dreams are connecting us. But does it matter?”

He swallows, and his hand presses gently to her cheek. It’s cold at first, in this cold forest, but then it warms, skin to skin. “I think it does.” His voice is low. “Even if I don’t care why. Even if all I care about is—”

A car horn blares in the street outside, and Rey jolts awake. It takes her a few seconds to realize she’s in her bedroom, alone, staring up at her spider plants and the sunlight angling across her ceiling. It’s late in the morning, and Rey’s cheek feels the absence of Kylo’s hand, and there’s a frustrated twinge deep in her core that she tries to ignore as she rolls out of bed to check on her plants.

The day is nearly unbearable. She’s not supposed to go out to the circle until tomorrow, and she has no other work booked today. Finn is resting up, so they can't hang out. Rey ends up walking through the city, up and down blocks, through neighborhoods, across parks. Her feet know the routes, even if some of them are far enough from home that she usually drives them. She used to walk them, before Temple Coven, before the stipend that let her buy a car she could rely on to not fall apart if she used it for more than moving days. She doesn’t get home until late afternoon. She makes a plate of food and pretends to watch a movie while she eats, but her mind is everywhere else.

Tomorrow is going to be long. Rey takes the time to pack her backpack before going to bed, to set up the kettle and tea and her travel mug. That way she can sleep as late as possible tomorrow and then head straight to the circle.

She texts Finn right before bed. _I forgot to text sooner bc I’m an ass. Want to carpool tomorrow?_

 _Yes!!!_ is his immediate reply, followed by some enthusiastic emoji usage. Rey smiles. That’s Rose’s influence on him. It’s endearing, and it warms her heart. She fixes the details with him, then sets her alarm and turns off the lights and crawls into bed.

Her room is dim and quiet and cool. Rey burrows under the covers, all curled up on her side the way she likes, and closes her eyes, trying to let sleep wash over her. Hoping to fall into the dream. It’s shadow-work, dream magic is, according to Kylo. And she feels that, in the way it echoes there, in the darkness, the deepness of the forest, the fog that surrounds them. How can Temple think shadow-work pulls you into evil? There’s no evil in that forest. Depths, and secrets, and desires, yes. But not evil. There’s no evil in Kylo’s eyes when he stares at her, in the soft press of his lips, in the gentle brush or the wanting grasp of his hands.

Rey feels her pulse quicken. She turns her face into the pillow and shifts under the blankets. The memory of his breath on her skin, even just the skin of her cheek, is making her— She tries to breathe evenly. Instead she remembers the sound of her name on his tongue, low and wanting and only half-believing he was touching her, finally. The way her fingers tangled in his hair. The way her stomach and hips pressed against him, all the layers of their sweaters and jackets between them, too many layers for her to feel his body heat. She wants to feel—

She bites her lip and clutches at the edge of a blanket. The heat pooling at her center isn’t helping her fall asleep. But she shouldn’t— would it cross any lines to—

In her imagination, his mouth doesn’t stop at her neck. He travels further down, pulls down the collar of her sweater, lays kisses and murmured half-promises against the skin of her chest. Rey shivers and shifts her hips. Kylo is on his knees, pushing up her sweater to kiss her stomach, her hands are fisted in his hair to hold him fast against her, and she wants— she wants—

She gives up and shoves her hand down the front of her pajama pants, under the waistband of her underwear. When her fingers press against herself, she gasps and squirms. She’s already so wet, just from thinking—

It doesn’t take long, with the ride her mind is taking, the way her body is sparking just at the thought of Kylo’s tongue against her stomach, her hip, the thought of him tugging at the waistband of her pants. When Rey comes, she keeps quiet because her walls are thin, but she keens softly and can’t stop herself from letting his name break across her tongue.

She lies still in the darkness, her body coming down, relaxing down into the sheets. Her breath is still ragged, but it slowly evens. It’s easy, now, to feel sleep pulling at her, with the tension gone and her body limp. Her thoughts fall away into quiet, soft darkness, and it’s not long before she drifts away.

Rey thinks she’s been asleep for a while before the dream starts. It seems like there was something before it, some span of restful nothing before her feet feel the earth beneath them and the moonlight is shining overhead (the moon is always full, here) and she can hear his breathing, and hers, and feel their hearts beat.

Kylo is standing on the other side of the clearing, his face unreadable. “Rey.” Her name sounds like a prayer when he speaks it. It makes her breath come short. He crosses the clearing towards her, making the fog curl away in his wake; he stops just short of her, looking down at her, searching her face. “You…”

“I what?” She wants to grin playfully at him, but something in his manner feels heavy, a good heavy, a weight that could break over them and wash them in something she wants.

“Did you—” Kylo stops himself. His cheeks flush. And in the space of the dream, the magic that’s binding them here, she knows what he means, she knows that he knows.

Her own face flushes. “How do you—”

“I don’t know. I can just feel— as soon as we came here, I could feel—”

“Yes.” She presses her lips together right after she says it, as though she could take it back. But she can’t.

His breathing is uneven. He can’t seem to look away from her face. “Rey…” He swallows, his hands flutter up near her sides, then fall away again. “Rey—”

“Yes. Kylo, yes—” And she reaches for him the same time he reaches for her, mouths meeting, bodies meeting, and every inch of her skin rushes with sensation as he wraps her in his arms so completely that the entire forest around them falls away. Rey twines her arms around his neck, kissing him hungrily. The satisfaction of her own touch before she slept is gone, and now all she can do is burn with wanting.

Kylo’s fingers grip hard at her back, her shoulder. He makes a low noise into her mouth, and when she bites his lower lip, he gasps and something in his eyes goes dark. He pushes her back, half-growling against her, until her back hits a tree, and he’s pressing against her, his hands hard on her sides until he suddenly pulls away, breathing hard and whispering, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

“Don’t be.” She grabs the collar of his shirt and pulls him back to her, her mouth hot and open and wanting as she moves her kisses from his lips to his jawline. He groans when she presses her tongue under his jaw, back near his ear, when she pulls his head to the side and kisses down his throat. Nothing, there’s nothing but him, and this.

His hands at her waist reach under her sweater. They’re large and cold against her skin, and she shivers, feeling his touch warm quickly.

“Can I—”

“Yes, yes, anything, Kylo—”

His hands on her breasts, her head as far back as she can get it against the tree, his mouth pressing open-mouthed kisses against her collarbone, his breath on her skin and her name on his tongue and his hardness pressing against her, their breathing ragged, her want, her want as her hands grasp his waist and—

And her alarm blares and she fully sits up in bed, her body hot and her mind reeling. It takes a solid five seconds for Rey to realize she’s woken up.

“ _Fuck_!” Her heart is still pounding. Her legs are weak when she swings them to the side and climbs up out of bed. “Shit. Fuck.” She turns off her alarm and runs her hands down her face. It’s noon, and she has to pick up Finn in an hour.

Rey takes a long shower as cold as she can stand. It’s not only to cool her skin and her wanting (though that certainly needs done; she can’t remember ever feeling so lost in need, in desire, so overwhelmed— but no, she can’t think about it or it’s all she’ll think about). She has to start getting her mind ready for the ritual. It’s Veilnight. She has work to do.

And no chance of seeing Kylo tonight, if what her covenmates tell her about this ritual are true. Supposedly she’ll be too bone-tired to make it to the forest.

She’s have to find out.

Grateful for her preparations the night before, Rey is able to check her plants, give a brief devotion at her altar, and scoot out the door in time. Her hair is still wet under her hat, and it makes her shiver. But it’s bright and sunny despite the chill in the air, and the sky is clear.

Finn bounds into the passenger seat with entirely too much energy; Rose hops into the back seat. “Bagel, Rey?”

“Please.” She holds her hand back and gives her thanks when Rose passes her a bagel half-wrapped in wax paper. “What do we have?”

“Onion bagel. Already has entirely too much sriracha cream cheese on it.”

“You’re an angel.” Rey pulls back out into the street, checks her mirrors, changes lanes, and bites into the bagel, feeling herself grounding more in the waking world.

“I can’t believe you eat that,” Finn grouses, but it’s a playful grousing. “Don’t breathe in my direction.”

“You eat cinnamon-raisin, Finn. You don’t get to criticize.”

They drive through the city, out to the road that will eventually wind up into the hills, to the cabin, to the Temple Coven’s circle. They talk as she drives, but Rey lets her Gift reach out, feeling around them. She doesn’t exactly see anything along the side of the road, but she feels like she ought to be seeing something. The further they get out of the city, the more she notices the feeling. Finn and Rose start to go quiet.

“There’s more of them closer to the circle,” Rose says. She’s right.

When they get out of the car, it’s still sunny and clear-skied and not too windy, but there’s that autumn-something in the air, unmistakably. Rey’s felt it all her life at this time of year. A wildness, even in the heart of the city. Like the wind could grab you and pull you away somewhere strange and powerful, if you let it. And that feeling is strong in the air around the circle.

They busy themselves right off. Leia and Maz are already here, working in the cabin. Paige is out in the circle; she has the flame-tending shift until the ritual begins. Maz gives Rey a crinkly-eyed smile. “Take Paige some power pucks, won’t you? She’ll need extra strength, going right from tending into ritual.”

There’s plenty to do to keep her hands and head busy. She takes the snacks to Paige, who accepts them gratefully. (She pauses to feel for the magic around her; like shimmering gossamer shifting in the wind, she can feel the veil between her world and the spirit world, can see the shapes pressing into it.) She lights incense on the shrines to the Old Gods inside the cabin and says a series of prayers of supplication. She helps Rose and Kaydel, once she’s arrived, carry out to the circle the tables they’ll need. Luke gets there late, but nobody says anything about the lateness, and he joins them all in carrying the supplies out to the circle. Braids of rosemary and grass and the sand-filled ceramic dishes to burn them in, the brass censers and charcoals for loose incense, the bowl of apples, the cups, the pitchers, the candles, the bones and stones and bundles of flowers.

As the afternoon passes, everyone goes quietly to different corners of different rooms of the cabin. Meditation before the Veilnight ritual is important, Rey’s told. She needs her Gift to be at its best. So she sits alone in the nook at the top of the stairs on a cushion on the floor. This is one of her favorite spots in the cabin. There’s a south-facing window, and sunlight spills in most of the day. Dried flowers and herbs hang in front of the window, and knotted wall hangings with spells woven into them hang on the walls. It’s peaceful and still, no matter how full and loud the cabin is. Rey can always find herself here.

She sinks down into herself, sitting in that sunbeam, and feels her Gift. The feeling like sunlight on water. The aching sort of warmth of a hot mug of tea under too-cold fingers. The retreating-ocean-wave feeling of cleansings, the blinking-away-raindrops feeling of uncrossings, the drawing-hearts-on-fogged-windows sensation of blessings. All of it is inside her, all the time, part of her blood and bone and sinew, part of her heart and mind and spirit.

And the rest of it. The part that felt the pull to the forest. The part that woke up when she looked into Kylo Ren’s eyes. The slice of cold air into lungs when first stepping out on a freezing morning. The darkness and pressure of deep, deep water. The way sparks dance above a fire. The shadow in her, just as sure as the light, though she let it sleep for so long because she thought she had to. She can’t quite unlock it, not all the way, can’t let it run wild and free like Kylo does. She doesn’t understand it enough, yet. Her teachers in Temple Coven wouldn’t bar her from it for no reason. But she lets herself touch it. She lets herself feel it there, know that it’s part of her, even if she doesn’t do the workings. And she feels her Gift sigh, settle into something closer to completion, and the power of it sings over her skin.

The coven has dinner together. Nothing heavy, a not-too-thick soup, enough to sustain them without weighing them down. Finn is more serious than she’s ever seen him, not dour but focused. She knows the feeling. The spirits are dancing all around the cabin, all around the circle, and Rey is ready.

One by one, they don the ritual cloaks, the brown shrouds that are meant to make them look a bit less human and a bit more spirit, that the spirits might listen to them. They go out to the circle, carrying their last few supplies, the bread and the bowls of paint and, in Leia’s hands, her intricately-carved ritual knife, taken from the locked box where it lives on the top shelf of the pantry. Maz gives Paige her robe; she puts it on; and they take their positions around the fire. The sun is setting, and Rey takes in a breath as she swears she feels the air shiver around her.

Maz walks around the circle, stopping at each of them, one by one, to paint their faces and arms and hands. (Their arms are bare under the cloaks, short sleeves or sweater sleeves rolled up; it’s cold, having bare arms in the night.) Blue and white dots under their eyes, lines across their foreheads, simple sigils on their cheeks and the backs of their hands, bands around their arms, all applied with smooth, firm, practiced strokes. Maz has been a witch longer than even Luke and Leia. She knows how to deepen their disguise, make them even more approachable to the spirits, while working protection into every line.

The spirits are not malicious or cruel, but their world is very different than this world. They live by different guidelines. It’s easy to be swept off by a spirit, if you don’t know how to protect yourself. But they’re part of it, the magic, the Gift, that makes Rey who she is, that makes her self hers, that transcends the things that have happened to her, both good and bad (her parents, the orphanage, the empty-pocketed years, her plants, Finn, Rose, spaghetti dinners, the coven, Kylo) and lets her be just Rey. Just Rey. And when Maz presses the last dot to the sigil on her right hand, Rey is fully present, and she is fully herself.

The wind lifts. Rey takes a deep breath, and she steps to the table. The candles have been lit, using burning wands brought from the bonfire. She takes up a braid of rosemary and its sand-filled bowl, she lights the herbs and grass in the candle flame, and as it begins to smoke, she begins to pace the circle.

Her Gift rises in her like an ocean wave. She lets it wash over her as she walks the perimeter of the circle, moving anti-clockwise, and feels the spirits drawing in closer. The magic courses through her, through the smoke of the burning herbs, and spirals out into the world around her. This is all there is: herself, and her Gift, and the veil thin between the worlds. When she gets back to her starting point, she feels it. The cleansing rushes back, like waves retreating, the thin layer of water pulling backwards over the sand, salt and foam sweeping everything away. And it’s done: the circle is purified.

Finn starts next, carrying a cup and walking clockwise around the edge. He sprinkles water (mixed with herbs, with honeys, with wine) around the border, and Rey feels it rising like light shifting on water, the shimmering blue-white energy of the shields he’s raising. Cleanse the circle. Protect the circle. Then the ritual can begin.

And when Finn gets back to his place, it does.

Luke, radiating power in his cloak, arms raised, voice strong, calls out the opening words. ( _The Old Gods, above and below, open the window between the worlds, we beseech you_.) The rest of them pick up the chant, voices rising and falling. ( _Come, spirits, and dance in our circle. Come, spirits, and drink of our wine_.) They tear off pieces of bread and cast them into the fire in offering. They raise their hands and voices in song. They light the incense and pass stones through the smoke, naming the points of their city. They wrap bones in the petals of flowers, naming spirits. Maz casts powder into the fire, making it spark and dance, and they raise their chant, call down protection, raise up thankfulness, sealing the bond with the Old Gods, sealing the pacts with the spirits. Their Gift, their energies, their breath given up so the spirits will stay in their world and the city will sleep safe another year.

Leia stands at her table. She looks regal in the firelight, the cloak streaming from her shoulders, the paint on her face and hands making her look distinguished instead of strange. She takes up her ritual dagger in one hand, and with another, she selects an apple. (Rey remembers the tingling feeling, guiding her fingers.) Leia slices the apple with the dagger and reads in the pattern of the seeds the omens for the coming year.

“Change is coming,” she calls, her voice strong in the night. “Change in allegiance, and in the magic of the circle itself.” Rey shivers, but maybe it’s only the chill of the night and the close pressing of the spirits.

They weave garlands of garlic and thyme, working in the heightened magic of the ritual, powerful charms of protection and good fortune. They dip their fingers in the holy water and anoint the figures of the Old Gods that watch over the central table. They pace around the fire together, each casting the dregs of a cup of wine into it, making it sputter but never near going out.

Finally they close down the circle. Finn and Kaydel walk the perimeter, lowering the shields and wards. Paige and Rose give the rest of the bread to the fire, completing the offerings. Rey finds her center and casts out a blessing. It grows like a cloud over the circle, winding around them. Leia breathes into it, and Luke, and Maz, and Finn and Rose and Paige and Kaydel. And the blessing settles over them, gentle and light, and all of the candles blow out in a breeze Rey doesn’t feel.

She can hear crickets, now, where she couldn’t before. The spirits— she can still sense them, but they’re no longer pressing so insistently against the veil. The fire is just the fire again, the crackle of wood burning and less the beacon that burns their offerings. And Rey is so tired her knees buckle and she has to catch herself on the edge of the table.

“Told you,” Finn says, but he hardly looks better himself.

“Wash at the trough,” Luke says. “Then go inside. I’ll watch the fire until Chewie gets here.”

Rey doesn’t need told twice. With the ritual done and the magic lifted, all she feels is heavy and tired and longing for sleep. There’s a buzzing in her head that she knows she needs to clear, though. So she follows everyone else to the trough at the side of the cabin. It usually sits empty, but it’s been re-cleaned and filled with water for them. Herbs and flowers float in it. They wash the sigils off their skin and shed their cloaks, shivering a little in the night; but with the paint and cloak gone, Rey feels firmly of the earth again, not so caught up in the magic, and the buzzing leaves her head.

Chewbacca is inside, his great tall frame immediately recognizable in the kitchen. He sets bowls of stew and chunks of bread at the table, and Rey drops into a seat between Maz and Kaydel and inhales what she’s been given. Her body relaxes further with the refuel, but the relaxing makes her even tireder.

“The dishes can wait until morning,” Maz says. “Go and sleep.”

Someone has to bring in the supplies from the circle. Maybe it’s Luke. Maybe Rose is helping— Rey doesn’t see her or Kaydel. She isn’t paying attention, though; she just stumbles up the stairs to the loft and kicks off her boots and falls into one of the twin beds lined up under the ceiling beams. She’s asleep before she can even notice if any of the others have made it up, and she sleeps too deeply to dream.

 

 

  
Rey must have been asleep by ten o’clock (the ritual, though a couple hours long, started at sunset, and sunset isn’t so late this time of year), but she doesn’t wake up until nearly eleven anyway. The cabin is quiet. People are already awake — she can hear activity down on the main floor — but it's subdued. Maybe so as not to wake her and whoever else is still in bed.

Her stomach is croaking and her head feels fuzzy. Finn is sitting on one of the other beds, pulling on his jacket. “You ready? We're heading out soon.”

“Yeah.” She looks blearily out the window as she’s pulling on her boots. “How long will Chewie watch the fire?” she asks, her voice still thick with sleep and hoarse from chanting.

“Until now, pretty much. Luke’s starting the noon shift instead of going to brunch at Leia’s.”

“He’s really focused on duty, isn’t he.”

Finn shrugs and rubs his eyes.

It’s another crisp morning, and a strong cup of tea wakes Rey up enough for the drive to Leia’s. They leave behind the cabin, the supplies from the ritual (which have been brought inside and are cluttered on the worktable in the pantry, to be picked through and washed and put back in their places over the weekend), Luke and Chewbacca out at the fire. Leia lives in the city, though in the historic district, not so far into the heart of it as Rey.

They pull up in front of a row house with clean brick, crisply-painted trim, and actual working shutters. Rose was right: it’s not ostentatious or very large, but it’s impeccably neat and puts a good face forward. And when Leia lets them inside, it’s more of the same. Cream- and brass-colored vases overflowing with flowers, round mirrors that bounce the light, old but clean and bright rugs, neat bookshelves crammed full of books, not a scuff mark or chipped edge in sight on the baseboards. There’s not a speck of dust to be seen. But it's not sterile. The light is warm, and the fabrics are soft, and the air of it is calm and welcoming. It’s the kind of house where she could easily cozy up on the couch and doze and not feel out of place.

“This is somehow exactly what I expected,” she says, and Leia smiles.

The brunch isn’t a sit-down formal affair. Instead, Leia brings trays into the living room and clutters the coffee table with them, and everyone sits on the couches and ottomans and crowds around together for coffee and juice, sliced oranges and pears, lox and smoked turkey and cheese and bread and hard-cooked eggs sliced in half and sprinkled with paprika. Rey unabashedly fills her plate (she’s been in Temple Coven for a year; they know her appetite by now) and relaxes and enjoys the rebalancing, the refueling, after last night’s efforts.

When everyone has eaten, they settle back with drinks and break off into twos and threes of conversation. Rey excuses herself to the bathroom (she’s a cup of tea and two glasses of juice into her morning, after all). On her way back, she pauses in the hall. It’s a small hallway, tucked between the living room and the stairs at the back of the house, and there are framed photos hanging on the wall. They’re the first photos Rey’s seen in this house.

There are a couple of Leia and someone who must be Han. She doesn’t know much about Han except that he died a few years ago; they look happy in the pictures. (More or less. In one, Leia is clearly rolling her eyes and Han’s arms are crossed, but they’re still leaning against each other. They’re so young in that one that it makes Rey’s heart ache a little.) One of Luke and Leia, and Luke and Han, and the three of them, and Han and Chewbacca.

Rey pauses. Her pulse quickens. There are two photos she can’t look away from. In one, Leia and Han are sitting in the grass somewhere, and there’s a little boy, no more than three years old, dark-haired and dark-eyed and laughing in Leia’s arms. Leia has never mentioned a son.

And the other photo is the one that is rooting her feet straight into the floor and making it hard to breathe. It’s a school picture, probably a senior year photo, and so he looks different, his hair shorter and his ears sticking out more, but it’s unmistakably Kylo Ren.

Rey is still standing there when Leia comes down the hall. She stops, watching Rey, and says nothing. Somehow Rey manages to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “Who is this?”

Leia looks away. “Ben Solo,” she says, her voice low. “My son.” And she walks past Rey and goes into the bathroom and shuts the door.


	5. Chapter 5

Rey drops Rose off at home after brunch — properly at home, with Paige, instead of at Finn’s — so it takes a bit longer to drive back to her street. Finn comes over to hang out, as they’d planned, and they vegetate on the couch, watching movies and still decompressing. Rey is grateful for the relative silence and Finn’s own need to be a little withdrawn because she couldn’t possibly keep up a conversation right now.

If Kylo is Leia’s son, then he must know Leia is in Temple Coven. Doesn’t he? Why hasn’t he ever told Rey? But she remembers the tension that overtook him when she asked about his mother. She doesn’t know the story. Maybe he has good reason. But it’s a reminder that, for all the pull between them, for all her heart is telling her, there’s still so much she doesn’t know about him. She wants to go straight to him, to ask him why he didn't tell her when he knows she knows his mother. Wants to know why nobody has ever mentioned him in the year she's been with the coven. The absence of him is a clear-cut shape, now that she knows about it, and something about it makes her antsy.

But she's can't, right now. So she tries to fold it up and put it away until she'll be able to talk to him.

None of them have to worry about going back to the circle tonight. Tonight Leia is working the evening shift and Maz is tending the fire overnight, and the younger members of the coven still want to blow off steam after Veilnight. So just before sunset, Rey walks with Finn to Poe's apartment, gathering herself for a night of fun, of forgetting. She can always ask Kylo later. Her cheeks flush as she remembers her last dream of him. She forces herself to think instead of talking about magic, about his hands when he worked knot magic— no, not that. Best not to think of him at all, now. Not while she's trying to have fun with her friends, and not until she learns a little more. Fold it up. Put it away. She's firm with herself on this as they climb the stairs to Poe's.

Jessika is there, and Paige and Rose, and Kaydel. Poe makes tacos (even portobello mushroom ones with vegan cheese for Kaydel), and the Tico sisters bring several bottles of the cheapest whiskey and toilet-water gin possible. They spread those across the coffee table while the apartment begins to smell of warmed tortillas, and Kaydel, with a shimmy of her shoulders to ground herself and a wave of both hands and a coy waggle of her eyebrows, transmutes the garbage liquor into top-shelf stuff. (She could do it from tap water because she's damn good at transmutation, but that would require either enormous energy and concentration or vast quantities of ritual supplies, neither of which she wants to waste on a fun night with friends, which Rey can respect.)

The tacos are good. The gin — mixed with soda water and blackberry syrup, and with which Rey sticks because she's never been a whiskey girl — is even better. She downs two jam-jar glasses before she realizes it. Her head is swimming a bit, happily, as she finishes her third taco and licks melted cheese off her fingers.

They play cards, getting drunker and laughing louder. Rose leans on Finn, giggling, his hand around her waist and fingers brushing at her hip. Poe communicates solely in song for a while, just because, his voice strong and clear and pretty. Paige laughs and copies him, until it devolves into a nicely-harmonized duet that everyone applauds.

"Let me read everyone's cards," Rose says, setting down her whiskey and cider.

"Did you bring yours?" Paige asks.

"No, but I can use the playing cards. Can I, Poe?"

"Only if you do me first." He waggles his eyebrows, at her or at Finn, maybe both.

Rose reads for him, then for Kaydel, then for Jessika. They're all sitting on the floor now, more or less in a circle, as Rose lays out cards. She does name readings, one card for each letter in a person's name. Then it's Rey's turn. She scoots over directly across from Rose and lays her hands in Rose's while Rose closes her eyes for a moment, breathing softly, feeling for guidance. Then she shuffles the deck, cuts it, and lays out three cards.

With Rey's track record with divination, she's certainly never tried with regular playing cards. She glances at Rose, whose brow is furrowed. "Jack of spades," she says. "This is an important person. Someone who carries a lot of influence. Maybe change." She points to the middle card. "Ace of hearts. The beginning of something— um, emotional. Not necessarily love, though it could be." Poe whoops softly, but Rey ignores him and watches Rose move her finger to the last card. "Five of clubs. A disturbance in communication. Dishonesty, maybe, or blindly accepting something before you understand it."

The living room is warm and cozy, but Rey feels a small shiver. "So you're gonna fall in love with some bigwig who lies to you?" Jessika asks.

"Could be one interpretation." Rose gathers up the cards, shuffles them back into the deck. "I'd say the message is just be discerning with anyone new you meet, especially if you have a big emotional response to them." If she slightly slurs over the word _discerning_ , nobody faults her for it.

Rose finishes reading cards, and then everyone breaks off slightly. Paige and Poe and Kaydel end up crammed in the kitchen, cleaning up from the tacos and laughing almost incessantly; Rose and Jessika sprawl across the couch, Rose answering Jessika's unending questions about how divination works. Rey is halfway through her fourth blackberry gin, and she leans her head on Finn's shoulder. The tacos helped, and she made the second two a little less strong than the first two, but she's still floppy and smiley and warm, even despite the twinge Rose's reading had given her.

"I need air," Finn says. Sometimes he gets sweaty when he's drunk. "Come out with me?"

"Of course." He pulls her to her feet; she stumbles against him and giggles, and they go out onto the balcony.

It's cold outside, enough that Rey wishes she'd grabbed her jacket, but not yet cold enough for big coats, and she still has on her hat, so she can brave it. They lean their elbows on the balcony railing, holding their drinks precariously in gin-loosened fingers, and look down at the city lights. Rey likes how the tail lights of cars chase red lines down the streets, how windows glow, how the street lamps blaze. It always makes her feel less alone, the city does. And friends help. She turns her head, feeling a slight dizzy blur as she does, and smiles at Finn. He smiles back.

It's nice when they don't have to talk. Sometimes it feels like they've been friends so much longer than barely-more-than-a-year. They just get each other. They're just safe with each other.

So when the twinge from the cards won't leave her, she swallows a mouthful of gin for courage, then asks, "What do you know about Ben Solo?"

He turns to look at her. "How'd you hear about him?"

"I saw his picture in Leia's house. At brunch. She said he was her son, but that's all she would say."

"I don't blame her." Finn has gone still. She'd thought he was already still, peaceful out here on the balcony, but he's even stiller, now. Then he heaves a big breath, big sigh, and takes a swig of his drink. "He used to be in the coven."

"What— our coven?!" The words spill out before she can stop them. She sees his brow furrow in confusion at the crack in her voice. The jolt she felt in her veins had come out in her words, a shock greater than is warranted as far as Finn knows. She backpedals, prays the alcohol will be enough of an excuse. "It's just— I didn't even know Leia had a son until then, let alone that he was a witch and in the Temple." But her heart is pounding now, and she casts her gaze back down at the lights. She's afraid her eyes will give too much away.

Finn sighs again. "He— I didn't meet him when he was still in the coven. I joined a few months after he left. What I've gathered is-- he'd always been pulled to shadow-work. Which is fine on its own. Luke and Leia and Maz know some shadow-work, too. They just don't like us learning it because it has more potential than light-work for... going bad."

"And Ben went bad?" She thinks of the way he looks at her, and she has trouble believing it.

"You could say that." Another swallow of his drink. "He left Temple for another coven. The Order Coven. They—" He hesitates. "I started with them, actually. When I found out I was Gifted. They reached out to me, and I didn't know shit, so I joined. But they only do shadow-work, which I thought was weird. And then I realized they were messed up, so I left and joined Temple instead." He snorts. "But Solo—he was already with us. He already knew better. But he left and took up there and didn't speak to any of our coven again. And..." Finn turns and sits in one of the patio chairs, setting his drink on the tiny table. He rubs one hand over his face. Rey watches him, feeling the breeze on her skin, feeling the condensation on her glass, feeling the thrumming of her blood in her veins. She knows her eyes are too wide, can feel the muscles tensing even through the haze of gin, but she can't stop it.

"And what." Her voice comes out small.

"He came back," Finn says. His voice isn't small, but it's flat. "A year after he left, he came back. I was there, by then. And he—" He looks up, finally meeting Rey's gaze, and his eyes are shadowed. "He killed his father.”

The sound of the cars and the wind and their friends' laughter inside fade away. All Rey can hear is the blood rushing in her ears. The feeling of cold glass under the fingers of one hand and chilled metal railing under the other slip into nothing. All she feels now is Kylo's mouth pressed to hers, opening for her, hungry and wanting; his hands trembling just apart from her hips before closing around her waist when her own hands wound in his hair. She smells the forest and feels his breath and hears him scatter her own name across her cheek, her neck, and she realizes she is shivering, far more then the chill of the night should cause.

"Why?" she manages to ask. She only knows a little about Han. He’d died three years before she joined the coven. He wasn't a witch, didn't understand magic, but had loved those who were and did. He was sarcastic. He was a mechanic. She'd wondered, once, when Luke had told her about him, if they would've been friends. She'd never known how he died.

"He didn't exactly wait around to tell us. We think—" Finn rubs the back of his neck. "The Order is fucked up. They think Gifted people are superior to non-Gifted. Think the regular people should be serving us instead of us protecting them. So maybe— since Han wasn't Gifted. Maybe he was supposed to kill him as some kind of— initiation. I don't know. It doesn't matter, Rey, he's a fucking monster. The coven cursed him so he can never come back to the circle. He's gone, that's what matters."

Her head feels lighter than the gin would make it. She's still shivering too much. Something inside her is coming apart. She sets her glass down on the little table and says, "I need to go home."

Finn stands up and puts his hands on her shoulders. "Hey. Are you okay?"

Rey shakes her head. "I'm— I just need to go. I'm sorry. I'll text you tomorrow."

"Rey, you're still really drunk. And I just— C'mon. Come back inside. Sit down for a while.”

"I really, really need to go." Her voice is straining with everything she's holding back. She can't stay here. She's going to break and she can't break here, she can't.

"It's almost midnight. Let me at least shield you good before you walk home."

Rey blinks and looks up at him. He looks so worried. Finn— sweet, kind Finn. She's not surprised he high-tailed it out of the Order the second he realized what they were about. Not like... "Okay," she says.

He takes a few minutes, quiet and concentrating. Rey feels the protection settle around her like soft golden netting, light against her skin and hair, and she knows nobody will touch her unless she lets them. "Still text me when you get home?" he asks, when the spell is done.

She nods. She doesn't trust her voice.

They go inside. Rey finds her jacket, her phone, shoves her feet into her shoes. Everyone is drunk enough that she doesn't have to explain much — she's going home, she'll be safe, goodnight goodnight, she loves them all. Finn watches her as she goes.

She makes it to the bottom of the stairs. As soon as she steps onto the sidewalk, she bursts into tears. The walk home from Poe's is twelve blocks long, and she sobs for eight of them, curling in on herself as she walks, her breath shuddering thin and raw in her throat. Then for three blocks, she feels lost and empty, like she's floating along on the wind closer and closer to home, her eyes and throat sore. Then for the last block, she's back to trembling. She trembles up three flights of stairs and down the hall and into her apartment, door locked three ways, texting Finn as she turns the last lock, and she drops everything on the welcome mat and plunges into her dark living room.

Rey paces, and her mind won't settle. She can't even form a coherent thought yet. Shock and alcohol and something she doesn't want to call betrayal because that would betray too much of her own heart are all swirling in her, keeping her muddled.

Eventually she finds herself in the bathroom, staring in the mirror. Her mascara is streaked on her cheekbones and her eyes are puffy. She washes her face and brushes her teeth and drinks a glass of water, changes into the t-shirt she wears to sleep, and gets in bed.

She can't sleep. Of course she can't sleep. Her muscles twitch with unbidden adrenaline, and her heart is aching so much it carves out a pit in her belly, and her head hurts with trying to fit Ben Solo and Kylo Ren both in there, both as one person, as Leia's son and the man who killed his father and the man from the woods, from her dreams, who makes her—

She gets back up out of bed and resumes pacing, this time in her bedroom. Slowly she realizes that it's not just shock keeping her restless. It's anger. She's angry. She's pissed. She's more furious than she's ever been in her life.

By the time she pulls on jeans and a sweater and grabs her keys, Rey is completely sober. She's paced for hours, and the night is breathlessly still when she goes outside, gets in her car, coaxes the engine to life, and drives away.

Dawn is closer than midnight by the time she gets out of the city. She doesn't want to go to the circle, doesn't want to explain anything to Maz. She parks at the bottom of the hill and walks up, silently as she can, to the cabin. The glow of the fire is faint around the corner as she creeps inside, not letting the door make a sound when it closes so Maz won't notice her.

She raids the supply pantries and cabinets. She stuffs angelica root in one pocket and a hag stone into the other. She grabs one of the woven charms of garlic and thyme, shoving her arm through the twine loop tied to the top. She scatters salt over herself and, too full of fury to consider feeling guilty, picks the lock on Leia's carved wooden chest in the pantry and takes out the ritual dagger and affixes it to her belt loop.

When she slips back into the darkness and towards the woods, she isn't afraid.

Rey stalks through the woods as silent as an animal. She feels her anger surging in her veins, and she feels her Gift stirring with it. It rises around her like waves of heat rising off summer pavement. Tree leaves rustle even though she doesn't touch them. One hand clutches the garlic and thyme; the other rests on the hilt of the dagger. And when her anger and her Gift finally carry her to Kylo's glade, she's not surprised to find him there.

"How could you?" she says, and she never knew how rage could rip the words from her throat, or how heartbreak could make it so tight the words are half-strangled. Her eyes blur with tears again before he even speaks.

Kylo looks at her, gaze heavy, and stands up. He doesn't ask what she means. Maybe he can tell she knows, by her face, by her tears, by the sheer fury rippling off her. "Why are you here?" he asks. There's no warmth in his voice. He steps towards her.

"Stop!" Rey whips out the dagger and points it at him. Her hand trembles around the hilt.

Kylo snorts. His gaze passes to the charm in her other hand, to the bulges in her pockets. "You didn't have to bother," he says. "I wouldn't hurt you."

"Liar." The tears are creeping into her voice. Her arm is sagging; the anger is still with her, but the rage is fading. It can only burn so hot for so long. And her heart— the ache in her heart is spreading, and it's making her tired.

His gaze is steady. "What did they tell you?"

"The truth. You betrayed the Temple and went to the Order. You think witches should lord over people who don't have the Gift. And you—" She can't. Her mouth won't form the words. It hangs in the air between them anyway, spilled out in the fog of her breath.

Kylo is still as stone. "Say it," he says. She shakes her head, tears on her cheeks. "Go on. Say it."

It’s the worst thing, the thing she cannot possibly reconcile with the man who joked with her about tea and waffles, who touched her cheek so tenderly, who told her she wasn’t alone—

“Say it.”

“You killed your father.” Her voice is so twisted she can barely shape the words, but there they are, stark and cold in the darkness between them. And he’s staring back at her without expression.

“Yes,” he says. “I did.”

Her eyes, her face, are hot with her tears. “I don’t understand.”

“I know.”

“I don’t _understand_!” It rips out of her in a cry, and her heart is cracking open. Where is the man she thought she knew? Who is this stranger with a face of stone? “How could you ever do something like this?”

“Because I had to.”

“Bullshit.”

His gaze is steady. “Snoke commanded it. I had to obey.”

“Who the hell is Snoke?”

“The master of my coven.” His gaze finally flickers away; the still mask of his face shifts into something harder to read. “When I joined the Order Coven, I swore to do what he bids.”

Rey shakes her head. “It doesn’t make sense. You were already in Temple. Why would you leave for— for that? To go off and try to make non-Gifted people, what, live under our boots?”

Kylo looks at her again, and the stoniness is gone, and he just looks tired. She’s noticed, all these nights, that he looks tired; shadows under his eyes are nothing new. But this is different. “No. I don’t— that’s not why I joined the Order.”

If he’s tired, so is she. Last night was Veilnight, and she hasn’t slept yet tonight, and her body has been riding absolute highs of emotions for hours, and she still can’t— she can’t— “Then why?”

He does that tic, moving his mouth as though holding back words. He runs his hand through his hair, and Rey forces herself to look away. “Ever since I was a boy,” he says, “I’ve felt the pull to shadow-work. It was always inside me, as big as the light, if not bigger. But I never learned to use it. My mother—” He makes a strange sound in his throat, then continues. “My mother taught me divination, but that was all. Nothing else. And my uncle didn’t even want her teaching me that much.”

“Luke,” Rey says.

Kylo scoffs. “Yes. But it didn’t matter. The shadow was too strong. It was coming out in me whether I wanted it to or not. Even if I wasn’t casting spells, it just… overflowed. And they still wouldn’t teach me how to use it.” He shakes his head. “Light-work was hard. There were a few things, but most of it… the shadow was too big. I couldn’t see past it. And Luke, my mother, all of them, they just wanted me to suppress it.” He swallows. His hand clenches at his side. “Until Snoke.”

“From the Order Coven.”

He nods. “He told me shadow-work was my destiny, and I believed him. He began teaching me, even though I wasn’t in his coven. I started working banishings, bindings, summonings.” He glances at her. “Dream magic.”

“You.” She feels cold for reasons that have nothing to do with the night air. “You did make those dreams.”

“I didn’t. Rey, I swear. I could have, if I’d wanted to, but I never did.” Something in his face softens. “I wanted you to come to me because you wanted to, not because I forced you.”

“Stop it.” She stares down at her shoes, just so she doesn’t have to look into his eyes. It hurts too much. “Finish explaining.”

He’s silent for a while. She can feel his Gift, his shadow, radiating off him. Finally, he says, “When Luke found out, he was furious. He confronted me and came a hair’s breadth from cursing me from the circle altogether. It only made me more sure that I didn’t belong there. So I left. And I joined Snoke. It was the only place I belonged.”

Rey lifts her head. Kylo isn’t watching her; he’s staring off into the forest. She gathers every shred of strength in her heart and asks, “Then why kill your father?”

He closes his eyes. “Joining the Order didn’t give me peace.” His breath fogs the air. She cannot look at his mouth. “Once I went fully into the shadow, I started feeling a pull from the light. So Snoke ordered me to kill my father to solidify my place in his coven. Because my father didn’t have the Gift. And that’s what Snoke believes.”

“Did it?” She can’t keep the anger out of her voice, doesn’t even try. “Solidify you?”

“No. It made it worse.” He finally turns to look at her, and she doesn’t look away in time. She’s caught, trapped in his gaze, in the gravity it still has.

Her breath is coming heavy, uneven. “How can I believe you? How can I believe anything— _anything_ you’ve said to me?”

“Rey, please.” Kylo’s voice goes soft and low. “What we— every night in the dream, and out here— Rey, I’ve never lied to you. Never. I would never.”

She stares at him, hard. Her heart is pounding. His face is so open and raw and pain is written all over it. Maybe— “Finish explaining,” she says again, and her voice is a little less harsh.

Kylo runs his hand over his face. “It made everything worse. Which I knew. Some part of me knew, even then. How couldn’t I? But Snoke—” He shakes his head. “I did what he ordered. And I ruined what little I had left. My own mother cursed me, banishing me from Temple and its circle. I can never go back. And I have nowhere else to go.” He sighs, ragged and heavy, the cloud of his breath spilling into the night air. “So I stay with Snoke.”

“That’s not true.” The words are out before she can stop them. “That’s not how curses work. They can always be broken.”

“Not this one.”

“What were the terms?” He stares back at her, not answering, so Rey steps in closer, bold strides until she’s looking right up into his face. “When Leia cursed you. She couldn’t have cast it without naming the terms, I know that much. What were the terms?”

The stoniness is back. She’s seeing it for what it is, now: a mask. A way of hiding his feelings. She doesn’t care. “As long as I have hate in my heart and am loyal to Snoke and the Order.”

“That’s it, then. If you leave them, for real and in your heart, then you can come back.”

“To what?” He scoffs and brushes past her, pacing away across the clearing. “Being chained only to light-work? Cut off from half my power? We’ve talked about this, Rey. There’s value in the shadow. The Old Gods balanced the light and the shadow, and witches are supposed to carry on that work. Balance doesn’t mean cutting off half the thing.” He turns back to her, eyes blazing. “Where can I go, if Temple can’t take me, either?”

“Do you need a coven?” Her hands are cold; her knuckles hurt from clenching the dagger, the charm, so hard. “You're being a hypocrite. The Order made you cut yourself off from the light just like Temple cut you off from the shadow. If it's balance— You could be solitary. Find balance in your own way. It would be better than this. Anything would be better than this.”

And the last of the mask falls, the last of the anger fades, and he’s just there before her, just himself, the man she’s known, almost trembling, and when he speaks, the sorrow in his voice is so palpable it could crush her heart. “I’m already alone in the Order. I don’t want to be even more alone.”

“You’re not alone.” She steps in closer to him. Her heart is beating steady, now; her gaze feels sure. “Please, Ben.”

He shivers. He turns away. He walks, slowly, off into the trees, and Rey doesn’t stop him.

 

 

 

  
She has the six o’clock flame-tending shift. Six o’clock in the morning. It’s almost that time when she finally picks her way, shivering from both cold and wearing-off adrenaline, back to her car. But she makes it to the fire in time to relieve Maz, who watches her carefully before going into the cabin.

Rey didn’t bundle up warm enough for sitting outside for six hours; she hadn’t planned on this timing. She has nothing to eat or drink, and her mind is still spinning. The sky is turning light by the time Maz returns, setting a cup of tea, a bottle of water, and a bag of power pucks next to Rey.

Rey looks up. Maz’s face is gentle. She says nothing, just nods, then leaves, drives away, leaves Rey alone on the hilltop.

She still hasn’t slept, and certainly can’t now. As the morning wears on, she’s detached and distracted and increasingly crabby. When Paige arrives at noon to relieve her, Rey barely says hello, and she goes off and bangs into the cabin, feeling deeply cross.

She stops in the doorway. Luke and Leia are there, bent over the table together, checking the calendar. “Rey.” Luke raises an eyebrow. “What—”

“Tell me how to break the curse.”

Of all the things she considered while sitting by the fire this morning, barging in on them and demanding this never occurred to her. Yet here she is, barging and demanding.

Luke and Leia stare back at her. Leia’s face is hard to read. And Luke— there’s anger in his eyes. “What curse?”

“Don’t pretend.” Rey stalks closer, hands in fists at her sides. “All curses have terms. Is it true that he can come back to the circle if he changes?”

Leia sits down slowly and closes her eyes. Pain. It’s pain in her face. “Yes,” she says. “If my son truly turns his heart away from Snoke and the Order, it would break the curse. He would be able to come back, if he wanted.”

“Why would he ever want that? When his own uncle almost cursed him just because he felt a pull to the shadow?”

Luke’s eyes flash. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Rey.”

“Didn’t you? Before he’d gone to Snoke, before he’d done anything wrong, you still nearly cast him out just for who he is.”

“It’s more complicated than that.” Leia’s voice is strained, and Rey feels a twinge of guilt.

Luke leans on the table. Weariness is in the line of his shoulders. “It’s a long story. Not for right now. But there is… a legacy, in our family. A dark legacy of misusing power. I saw the start of it in Ben, and I wanted to stop it before it could spiral out of control. But I didn’t handle it well, and you're right. I made things worse.”

“So would you take him back?” Rey’s heart is beating steady, but hard. Her palms are sweaty. Neither of them will look at her.

“Why would he come back? He’s lost, Rey.”

“That’s not true.” She leans on the table, mirroring him, and it finally makes him look her in the eye. Next to them, Leia lifts her head slowly. “There’s still goodness in him. So much goodness. And he has powerful light, just as powerful as the shadow. He knows he doesn’t really belong in the Order, but he doesn’t think he has a choice. If we help him know he does, maybe he would leave them, and Snoke.”

Luke furrows his brow. “How do you even know all this?”

“Does it matter?”

“Rey.” Leia’s face is so heavy with sadness it could break Rey’s heart. “I want to see my son come home. But I’m not sure it isn’t too late.”

“It’s not. I swear to you, it’s not too late.”

“You’ll put yourself at risk,” Luke says, “if you try to turn him. I think you’ve already put yourself at risk.”

Rey doesn’t waver. “I’m not going to give up on him.”

He sighs, bows his head. He pulls out a chair, the legs scraping on the old wooden floor, and sits. “Rey, your Gift is powerful. The most powerful I’ve seen since Ben. The only thing I can tell you now is to listen to that. Listen to your Gift and seek the truth. It’ll give you better guidance than I can anymore.” He almost smiles. “I’m just a tired old man.”

He’s more than that. Of course he’s more than that. But Rey can’t manage words of comfort right now, so she just returns the ghost of a smile. Then she turns and leaves.

“Rey.” At the door, Leia’s voice stops her. “If you can bring my son home…”

She turns back, just for a moment. “I will,” she says. She sounds certain. She is certain.

 

 

 

  
In the car, Rey turns up the heat, trying to warm herself. She hasn’t felt truly warm since Poe’s apartment, which was only a bit more than twelve hours ago but feels like days ago. But the heat makes her sleepy as she’s driving back into the city, so she rolls down the windows as well, letting the midday breeze chill her back into wakefulness.

She doesn’t go straight home. Instead she drives through the city for a while. It’s wasting gas and wasting time, but she isn’t entirely sure what to do with herself.

It’s nearly an hour later that she ends up in her favorite park, the one where she and Finn always bring their food truck lunches when the weather is mild enough. She walks out to her favorite spot under her favorite tree and sits on the ground. The earth is cold underneath her, and the tree trunk against her back is cold and solid and straight. (She absolutely is not going to think about the last time her back was against a tree, in a dream that feels so long ago now.) She sits tall and tries to ignore the tiredness in her body and mind, and she breathes slowly and sinks down to find her center.

Meditating doesn’t come naturally to Rey in general. Meditating when she’s overtired and in emotional turmoil and with a head full of too many contradictions seems nearly impossible. But she tries. She reaches for her Gift, like she did in preparation for Veilnight. It’s there, easy to find, flowing over her through her with every breath, every beat of her heart. She chases it out to its fullest extent, reaching out clear to the Old Gods themselves. Please. Please show me what to do.

And then she feels it. The pull, deep in her gut, the magnetic need. She’s so far from the forest now, in the heart of the city, but even here she can feel it.

So Rey follows the gods, follows her gift, and drives back out to the circle. She can practically feel her car sighing at her; it would roll its eyes if it had eyes to roll and a consciousness with which to pass judgments. Back and forth, over and over, careening back to the circle more often than she ever has. "Blame the magic," she mutters, and she keeps going.

Leia and Luke have gone. Paige is alone in the circle, tending the fire. She raises her eyebrows when Rey walks past. “Oak leaves?” Rey makes a noncommittal noise and keeps walking into the trees. Luke and Leia wouldn’t have told Paige, but it’s becoming more and more obvious to anyone with eyes that Rey is up to something. She doesn’t care right now; Paige can’t leave the fire to follow her. So she walks deeper into the forest.

Her pulse begins to quicken as she nears the clearing. But nerves are drowned out by her Gift singing yes, yes, this, here, drawing her in with a certainty that keeps her feet steady.

He’s there, crouched in front of his altar. Of course he’s there. It’s why her Gift pulled her in. He sees her — Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, sees her — and stands slowly. He doesn’t speak.

“You were right,” she says. “About the terms. If you denounce the Order, truly, then you can come home.”

The look on his face is like glass about to shatter. “It’s not my home anymore.”

“But it could be, again. You can still come back.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “Home is… different, now.”

“Ben, please.”

She doesn’t miss the flicker in his eyes when she says his name. He steps closer to her, and in a voice as soft as whispered wants in the depth of the night, he says, “Rey, come with me.”

Everything goes still around her, inside her. She realizes it’s half past three in the afternoon and she’s here in the forest, in full daylight, when his eyes look warm and open and the fog isn’t curling around them. “What?”

“Come with me. I can’t go back to Temple. I don’t want to stay with Snoke. You said it yourself. I can leave them both. I can find my own path, find my own way to balance the shadow and the light.” He blinks; his eyes are damp. “But I don’t want to do it alone. I can’t do it alone. Rey.”

Her name on his tongue is like a plea, like every moment they’ve smiled at each other, the first hesitant touch, the sacredness of this place in the night and what they’ve built here together. It’s everything she wants. Except—

“I love my coven.” Her voice is so much steadier than she expected. “I don’t want to leave.”

The broken look in his eyes flashes, changes, shifts into anger. He scoffs. “So you’re just going to keep cutting yourself off at the knees.”

“There’s room to grow. There’s a chance to change. But running away isn’t going to make that happen.”

Kylo’s gaze burns into hers. He draws even closer to her; his body is tall and broad, and his Gift is flaring, she can feel it. “You’re choosing them over me.”

“I’m choosing _myself_.” Her own anger sparks; she blazes right back up at him, feeling her own Gift rising to meet his. “And there’s room for you with me. But not like this. Not by running away and pretending nothing happened. Because it did happen, Ben. You’ve done the things you’ve done. And I—” She catches her words in her throat. “I have room for you anyway. But only if you face it. Not if you run away.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he seethes.

“Everyone keeps telling me that, but I think I’m seeing it pretty clearly. Like how right now you’re getting angry to cover up how hurt and scared you are—”

He grabs her shoulders and kisses her, hard, desperate. Rey’s hands fly up to take hold of the collar of his jacket, pulling him even further down to her, kissing him back. It’s searing; it feels like it’s sealing something.

Kylo pulls back, eyes wild, breath coming heavy. He searches her face, but for what, she doesn’t know. Her lips are tingling and her chest is rushing with feeling.

“Do shadow-work,” he says. He’s pleading. His eyes are wide and his lips are trembling and he’s pleading with her. “Do it, and see how great your Gift can be when you don’t limit it. Then you can tell me what you want.”

“Then you do light-work,” she whispers. “And tell me you don’t belong there.”

His hands slide away from her shoulders and fall to his sides, hanging limply. He looks exhausted. She wants to ask when was the last time he slept well, but no, not now. They can’t go back to that, not until he changes.

Rey stands with him in the clearing for what feels like forever, silent, only the birds and the wind rustling the trees around them. More and more leaves are falling, carpeting the ground in damp colors. Moving her feet feels like pulling up roots, but she does it; she turns, and she walks away, and she leaves him behind in the forest.

He doesn’t call after her.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we come to a close. Thank you to everyone for reading, commenting, and enjoying this journey with me, and particular thanks (in copious quantities) to the Reylo Charity Anthology. Thanks for such a wonderful event, and thanks for getting me to finally jump on into the Reylo fic pool. I like it in here. I think I'll stick around.

Despite how tired she is (it’s Saturday night; she hasn’t slept since Thursday night; these two days have felt like weeks), Rey can’t seem to wind down enough to get to bed. Her mind keeps spinning, tripping back over the course of things. Kylo that she knew. Ben that she discovered. The monstrous act that lay somewhere between them. (Is it Ben she’s known all along, that deep-eyed, dry-humored man who smiles for her? Was that Ben, not the monster Kylo Ren who betrayed his coven, her coven, and— But no, they’re the same person. Separating them by names and titles doesn’t help. That’s how he’s tried to run from his problems already; she won’t play into it, too.) And over and over, like a beating drum, one name: Snoke. Snoke, who made Ben believe he belonged only to the shadow. Snoke, who drew Ben in, promising him knowledge. Snoke, who ordered him to kill his own father, and Ben so lost in him that he obeyed.

Rey knows this isn’t her fight. She’s not the one who can break the curse. But she can’t understand how Leia’s son could have gone this way. She needs to know.

Dream magic is shadow-work, and so she doesn’t know much about it. But magic doesn’t belong to Temple Coven. Spells themselves are hard to find outside of covens, but with clever searching, the internet points her in the right direction.

She draws a chalk circle on her kitchen floor (not quite her ideal location, cramped between the refrigerator and the oven, but the living room and bedroom are carpeted, so it's this or the even smaller bathroom). She digs through her stash of dried herbs and incense and pulls out clove incense and loose mugwort. She lights them both and sits in the circle and closes her eyes and reaches deep inside for the shadow.

It rises to meet her readily. Her heart is beating strong as she feels it slip over her. And she breathes in the smoke from the mugwort and cloves (she should have opened the window, the smoke is filling the room, she should have texted Finn to come check on her if she didn’t check in within an hour, she should have—) and her head spins and she tries to feel for the slips of her Gift she can work into dream magic.

And then: there. Like oil, smooth and spreading. Rey sinks down into it and feels it slide around her. Her head feels light and heavy at the same time. Something is asking her a question. What does she want to do. Where does she want to go. What does she want to see.

Snoke. Show me Snoke.

And then she breathes in sharply and opens her eyes. The mugwort is still smoldering on its charcoal disk, but the clove incense stick has burned down completely. Rey looks down at her hands. It seems like they should be covered in— something. She can’t remember what. But they’re normal. Except for how every inch of her seems to be buzzing with power, everything is normal.

It’s midnight. She cleans up the circle, and she goes to bed, and she’s asleep almost immediately.

The dream comes on sudden and strong. It’s not the foggy forest where she dreams with Kylo — with Ben — but it is foggy, an almost orange-ish smoky sort of fog, and that’s all she can see. Rey reaches her hands forward and can’t even see them anymore, the fog is so thick. She tries her voice. “Hello?” It seems to fold back onto her in a way that makes her ears feel strange.

“Over here.”

His voice seems like it comes from everywhere. “Ben?”

“Over here.”

She turns and turns, seeing nothing but the swirling fog. One stumbling step forward, then another, in some direction, any direction. “Where are you?”

And then he’s there, in front of her, the fog parting enough for her to see him at last. He looks exactly as he looked the first time she dreamed of him, all in black, his hair flowing, his eyes dark. This place, where-ever she’s dreaming, isn’t moonlit, but he looks as though he’s washed in moonlight.

“Ben.” Her heart is in her mouth. Her hands reach for him, then stop, pull back. “I was trying to see Snoke. I was trying to understand.”

“Come to me.” His voice is low and smooth. “Come to me, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“Why now? Why not before?”

He laughs. It sounds strange, but then everything sounds strange in this dream. “I don’t think you realize how powerful the magic you’re working right now really is, little witch. You’ve impressed me. Come to me, and now you will know everything.”

Something— something. Something isn’t— she can’t quite get the thought to form. “You sound strange,” she says, slowly.

“Your magic is powerful, but imperfect. You need practice. Things here are a little strange, aren’t they?” He leans in close, his dark eyes burning into hers. “Now wake up, and come to me.”

For a moment she’s able to think, no, that’s not right; I cast this spell, this is my work, I’m the one who controls what happens. But then she’s blinking awake in her bed, and the dream is already fading. She tries to remember what she was just thinking, but it slips away, slides out of her mind like oil.

Rey sits up. The clock says three in the morning.

She should get started. She has a long way to go.

In the darkness, she dresses. She gets her keys and leaves her apartment, gets in her car, and drives out of the city.

There’s a kind of hypnotic quality to driving so late at night. The streets are empty. It must have rained while she slept; the lights reflect on the pavement in wavering lines and shapes. Rey is in the hills before she knows it, but she doesn’t go up the drive to the cabin. Instead she stops the car a little ways before the drive, pulling it off the road into the grass behind a row of trees. She gets out and walks into the trees and up the hill.

There’s no moon. It’s perilously dark. Her feet are almost moving of their own accord. It’s like the pull to the forest from before, but not quite; it’s like someone is calling her. She follows the voice she can’t hear.

It feels like she walks all night, but it’s still just deep and dark when she realizes she’s far past the clearing. She’s walked more than twice as long as it normally takes. But she keeps going, because the voice is still calling, and she has to answer it.

Her feet hurt by the time she finally steps out of the trees and into a clearing much, much bigger than the one where she meets Kylo. There’s a curved line of torches, lit and burning. No, not a line — a circle. It’s a coven’s circle. There’s no bonfire in the middle like Temple has. Instead there’s a ring of tree stumps, and in the center of them is a high-backed chair.

Kylo Ren is sitting in the chair.

“Come here,” he says. Rey walks forward. When she crosses the line of torches, something jolts through her body. She blinks. She— it’s like she just woke up. She stops where she is and looks around her again at the circle, the torches, the line of trees curving around them. Then back to Kylo.

He’s grinning a lopsided grin that makes her skin crawl. “What’s the matter with you?” she asks.

And then he changes. It’s the kind of dizzy blurring feeling she gets when she watches someone shapeshift, but not quite; it’s more like something is evaporating; and then it isn’t Kylo anymore. It’s a gaunt man lounging in the chair and eyeing her like she’s some sort of prize. He wears an embroidered shirt and a ritual dagger on his belt. “How—”

“A simple glamour,” he says, and his voice makes her grind her teeth together. “Well, not simple. Quite complex. But easy enough to cast, especially on one as trusting as you.” He tilts his head slightly. “Now what was your name, girl?”

She doesn’t answer him. She wants to turn and run from the circle, but it feels like there’s a wall behind her.

“Rey.” The way he says it is nothing like how Kylo says it. It sounds like he’s circling her, wondering which piece of her he should slice off first. “Congratulations on your foray into shadow-work. It was inexpert, to be sure, but powerful all the same.”

“You’re Snoke.”

“You sought me, and you found me. Or rather, I found you. I’m skilled at dream magic myself, you know.”

Her breath feels shallow. She’s not ready. She didn’t prepare for this. She didn’t know he’d be so— but how could a man who ordered someone to kill their father be anything less than this. “Did you do it? Did you join our dreams?”

“You and my disappointment of a pupil? No. It seems that was your separate Gifts reaching for each other. You’re quite as powerful as him, you know. It’s no wonder they gravitated together. And it was a bright enough spark for me to see it on him. It made it that much easier to find you.”

Rey is alone miles from anyone she knows, from anyone who can or would help. This man is a coven leader and a nightmare and can likely do things she can’t even imagine. She’s terrified.

And she’s angry.

“You call him a disappointment,” she says, and her voice rings clear. “But you’re the one who’s disappointing. You cut him off from his light-work and then insult him for being conflicted. It’s your own doing.”

Snoke laughs. “If you think that, then you know nothing.”

Everyone keeps telling her that. It’s really starting to piss her off.

“I know that Ben Solo still has light in him.” She strides in towards the ring of stumps. Towards Snoke. “I know it’s every bit as powerful as the shadow. And I know he can still break the curse. He wants to break the curse. And when he does, you’ll lose the strongest witch your coven has ever seen, and that loss won’t be even half of what you deserve for what you’ve done to him.”

“You’re a very bold girl.”

Rey stops just before the stumps. She’s close enough to see the dirt under Snoke’s fingernails.

“You would do well with us. You have great capacity for shadow-work. With you and Ren together, Order Coven could make great strides.”

“In oppressing non-Gifted people? Just because we can? No. Not on your life.”

Snoke grins at her, toothy and crooked. “On yours, then.”

He lifts a hand. The air in front of Rey begins to— glow, to pulse, a reddish color and a wavering and her feet, her feet are stuck, or her body is frozen, she can’t move. And she realizes the pulsing red air isn’t the feeling she gets of other kinds of magic; it’s not like feeling as though a protection spell is a soft golden netting. This is different. This is actually before her eyes. And she can’t move, and the light pulses brighter, and then it slams into her.

Her body seizes, shot through with pain. Stars explode in front of her eyes and Rey gasps thinly, fingers trying to grab something, anything to help her, but just curling uselessly at her sides. Then it passes, and she falls, the wind knocked out of her before she even hits the ground.

Her ears are ringing and everything is spinning and everything hurts. Snoke is laughing, distantly. Cold damp grass presses into her cheek. She’s lying on the ground. Rey pushes herself up slowly on aching arms and lifts her head to look at him. The distant firelight of the torches flickers cruelly on his face.

“Has that changed your mind?”

It’s hard to breathe, but her anger is still there, shaking behind the shock and pain. “Go to hell,” she rasps.

He hits her again. This time the air pulses a silvery color, and when it hits her, she goes so cold it steals her breath and stiffens her limbs. She can’t make her fingers move.

She’s on the grass again. Something else washes over her, something that sears her skin, and she screams, her vision tunneling, her head swimming, her mind trying to shut down to stop her from witnessing her own pain—

And then it’s gone, all at once. Rey lies still in the grass. Her breath comes uneven and ragged. Above her the sky, clear and full of stars, up where one of the two Old Gods sits. Beneath her body the earth, cold and hard, where the other god lies. She tries to reach for her Gift, but it feels so far away.

A sound nearby. Rey turns her head and feels her breath come in a small gasp, feels her eyes prick hot. Ben. Ben is here. Ben is here and standing over the chair where Snoke is slumped, and Ben has in his hand the ritual dagger from Snoke’s belt, and the dagger is coated in blood.

“Ben.” He whirls around at her voice, barely a voice. Rey pushes herself up so she can sit up, so she can stand, so she can go to him, but then everything tips sideways and goes dark.

 

 

 

  
Birds are singing, and Rey is warm. She’s comfortable and warm and doesn’t want to open her eyes. The birds sounds so pretty, and gentle fingers are stroking her hair, and everything feels soft and safe and warm.

Then she remembers Snoke, and she jolts awake.

“Shh. It’s okay.”

She turns her head and looks up and it’s him. It’s Ben. He’s staring down at her and stroking her hair and her head is in his lap. Rey furrows her brow. “You’re in short sleeves.”

“I am.”

“Aren’t you freezing?”

“It’s not so bad.”

His coat. His coat is wrapped around her to keep her side from lying on the cold ground, and his sweater is draped over top of her to keep her warm. It’s daylight, morning, and the birds are singing all around them here in the clearing next to Ben’s stone altar.

Rey sits up slowly; Ben lets his hands fall onto his lap in her absence. Her body feels whole, nothing hurting, nothing worn out. She looks at Ben curiously.

“I healed you,” he says, simply.

Something pulls at the corner of her mouth. A smile. “That’s light-work, Ben.”

“I know.” He glances away. “It’s actually one of my specialties.”

A small, breathy laugh escapes her. She hands him his sweater, and he pulls it back on.

For a few moments they stare at one another in silence. His eyes are so warm in the daylight, and the way he’s looking at her— “You killed Snoke,” she says, entirely too plainly. He nods. “Why?”

“Because he was going to kill you.”

Her heart flutters. Not at the killing — gods, no — but at the way he’s looking at her. The edge of tears in his eyes, the way he keeps biting his lip. I almost lost you, they say, though he won’t say it with his voice.

“What happens to Order Coven now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“But—”

“I’m not going back.”

Her breath catches. Rey reaches out before she can stop herself and grabs his hand. “Ben, are you—”

“And no, I’m not going back to Temple.” He drops his gaze. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” His thumb rubs over her fingers. His hand is warm. “But I can start by walking you back.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “If you keeled over halfway back and died of exposure in the forest, then I’d’ve gone to all this trouble for nothing.”

He takes both her hands and pulls her up to standing. Rey’s legs are weak — which is fair, considering that if it’s morning now, then she’s had three hours’ sleep in as many days — but nothing hurts, and her muscles hold her up. They begin to walk back through the trees together.

For nearly half the way to the edge of the forest, Rey is able to control herself. But then she can’t stand it anymore (because she doesn’t know if she’ll ever see him again, because she nearly died and he saved her, because after everything she still—), and she takes his hand carefully in hers. Out of the corner of her eye she sees his head whip around to look at her, but she keeps her eyes ahead. He twines his fingers through hers slowly, and when his hand is fully wrapped with hers, she gives it a gentle squeeze.

They come to the edge of the trees too soon. They stop far back enough that whoever is tending the flame — Rey can’t tell from here — won’t see them yet. She turns to face him and feels her breath catch because he’s still staring at her like she’s the only thing in his world.

“Please come back,” she says.

“I can’t, Rey. The curse.”

“You killed Snoke. That has to have broken it.”

“It’s not enough.”

“You just renounced the Order. And I know you’re sorry— I know— Ben, please.”

His fingers tighten around hers. He falls silent, but his eyes are so, so scared.

“Please. You don’t have to be afraid.” She hesitates, then: “Your mother wants you to come home.”

Ben’s face clouds. “She wants the son she used to have.” Anger is creeping into his voice. Anger to mask the pain, to mask the fear.

“Don’t do this.”

“She doesn’t want who I am now. How could she, Rey? How could any of them welcome back the kin-slayer shadow-worker who betrayed everything they are and broke all their oaths?” His hand slips out of hers. “There’s no place for me there.”

She holds her chin high and doesn’t break her gaze from his, not for a second, not now. “You’re wrong.”

Ben shakes his head. He looks like he wants to say so much. But instead he finally turns and stalks off into the forest, leaving her there alone, her hand cold without his to hold it.

Rey doesn’t move for a long time. The birds sing around her; a squirrel skitters up a tree; the wind kicks up, shaking leaves down onto her. Finally Rey wipes her cheeks dry and takes a shaky breath and walks back out into the circle.

Finn is sitting on one of the logs around the fire. When he sees Rey emerge from the forest, he leaps to his feet and runs to meet her halfway across the circle. His arms fly around her and Rey grabs hold of him, turning her face against the familiar fabric of his jacket, holding on for everything she’s worth.

 

 

 

  
Rey manages to drive home. Her apartment feels too quiet, somehow too empty. She does a devotion at her altar. She waters her plants. She makes a batch of chicken and rice and peppers because she’s forgotten when she last ate.

It should be so easy to sleep through the whole day, but she can’t. She lies on the couch with a baking show on in the background, but it’s hard to focus. She feels drained.

Lying there, in her fuzzy socks and under her favorite blanket, Rey closes her eyes and begins to meditate.

It’s different, now. She’s been slowly feeling out more and more pieces of the shadow that lives alongside the light inside her, in her Gift; and now she’s done a shadow-work spell, and it’s like everything is conscious in a way it wasn’t before. She slips into meditating like slipping into her favorite shoes. She can feel the Gift in her and the magic in the world around her; she can sense the tie that stretches between the Old Gods and this world; she can feel the shifting of this world around the world of spirits. It’s too soon to know for sure, but she has a suspicion that the next time she does light-work, it’ll be more powerful, more effective, for the shadow rising alongside it. And she thinks maybe now she might have a better chance at divination.

When the sun sets, she draws the chalk circle in her kitchen again, gathers the mugwort and her last stick of clove incense. But this time, before she starts to cast the spell, Rey sits in the circle, finds her center, and draws up shields around herself.

They rise almost without effort, shimmering like sunlight on water. It takes no time at all. And when she’s satisfied with her protection, Rey lights her incense, and she finds the shadow that will let her shape her dreams.

When she sleeps, the dream magic forms around her instantly. It’s the same swirling fog, but not quite as dense this time, and this time she can move through it, finding her way, shaping her path, until trees appear. She move through the trees, through the clearing where she used to meet Ben, onward until she finds him.

He’s asleep, and Rey realizes he is not dreaming with her. Instead, she is visiting him through her own dream.

His brow is furrowed even in sleep. Rey reaches out and touches his forehead, smoothing away the lines of tension. She wants to bend down and kiss him. She wants to ask him if he’s made up his mind. She wants so many things.

But all she does is lean close and whisper her message to him.

_Come back to the circle. I know you can. And I’ll be waiting._

When she wakes up, it’s easy and gentle, no gasping or jerking awake. She’s calm, and for the first time in what feels like ages, her heart is at peace.

But she also has a purpose. So she doesn’t linger too long in bed.

When she calls Leia to ask permission for her plan, there’s a solid twenty seconds of silence on the other end of the line before Leia says, “If that’s what you want.” Another pause, half as long. “If you think it will help, then yes. Of course, yes.”

So Rey packs both her backpack and a small duffel. She gives Finn, who has her spare key, a detailed list of which plants are where and how to check if they need watered and how much water to give if they’ve gone dry. She drives up to the circle, parks by the cabin, and walks out to the fire.

Luke is waiting. Rey wonders if his shift actually was before hers, or if he switched with someone to be here now. “You’re sure?” he asks.

“Never been more sure.” She sits down next to him and hands him a travel mug of tea.

“Do you think it’ll work?”

Rey sighs. Her breath makes a faint cloud in the air. It’s getting colder. “Nothing I do will make his decision for him. He’ll either decide to come back or not. But even if he decides he wants to, he’s afraid.” She takes a long sip of her own tea. “His Gift and mine are connected, somehow. We can feel each other. And if he feels me here, maybe he’ll be less afraid. Maybe he’ll come back to you.”

Luke is watching the fire. He looks tired. “I know he has a lot to apologize for,” he says slowly. “But so do I. He was scared, then, too. Full of shadow with no clue how to handle it, with me demonizing him for it. No wonder he ran.”

“He made his own choices.” Rey drinks more tea. It keeps her warm and keeps her awake. “But no, you really didn’t help.”

Luke narrows his eyes at her, and Rey stays very still for a moment, uncertain and waiting. Then Luke smirks and shakes his head, and Rey relaxes. “No, I didn’t. Maybe we’ll all get a chance to set things right.”

Now Rey is the one staring into the fire. It’s leaping and shifting, flashing its bright colors. “Do you think Leia can forgive him?”

It’s a while before Luke answers. “Not now,” he finally says. “Maybe not ever. But she loves him, and she wants him home.”

When he’s done with his tea, Luke leaves. The sky is overcast, the trees are growing more and more bare, and Rey is alone in the circle. She isn’t going to leave until either Ben comes back or she gives up. But she doesn’t plan on giving up.

Rey is awfully good at waiting.

She wants to be there through the nights; she feels like that’s the time he’s mostly likely to come. (It’s the time she knows him best, although he looks so warm in the daylight. She wants to see him in the daylight more, wants— but no. That’s not why she’s here. That’s not the point.) Someone else will come to cover the shift from six in the morning until noon so she can sleep, but other than that, her backpack is full of apples and power pucks and a jar of peanut butter she’ll eat straight off a spoon, and the outhouse and wash station are at the edge of the circle specifically for flame-tenders so they don’t have to go up to the cabin, and there’s plenty she can meditate on. And so she’ll wait.

It ends up being Finn who covers her sleeping shift the first few days, and only Finn. Everyone knows by now about Ben, about Rey’s hopes. Finn isn’t thrilled, but he helps her because he loves her, and he trusts her, and he trusts her Gift. “Nobody else wants to come,” he tells her on the third day. “They were all here when he left, and when he came back and killed Han. It’s harder for them.”

Rey’s gaze is fixed on the fire so she won’t stare at the treeline. “Do you think they’ll ever take him back?”

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? If he _can_ come back, it’s because he has enough remorse in his heart to break the curse. And if he’s that sorry, there’s at least room for a chance.”

He keeps his arm around her and lets her lean her head on his shoulder. He stays hours longer than he has to, after she’s awake.

The next day, Rose comes to cover the morning shift. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at Rey for a long, long moment. Then she hands her something wrapped in wax paper. Rey takes it and unwraps it, and she smiles. An onion bagel, smeared with an obscene amount of sriracha cream cheese. “Thank you,” she says. Rose nods and sit down. Rey, not pushing her luck, goes inside the cabin, eats the bagel for her dinner, and goes to sleep as the sun is just starting to wash the eastern sky pale pink.

Then on the fifth day, Kaydel shows up for the shift. She stands between Rey and the fire with her arms crossed, her hair wound up in two knots above the chunky-knit scarf wound around and around her neck and face. She stares off at nothing in particular for a while before saying, “I was here when it happened.”

Rey doesn’t have to ask what.

Kaydel looks right at her, her brown eyes hard. “Do you think he can really break the curse?”

And Rey knows she isn’t asking does he want to come back, or can he really leave the Order, or can he balance the shadow with the light. She knows what Kaydel is asking. And she’s never felt more sure than when she says, “Yes. I know he can.”

Kaydel sits down next to Rey. “Okay,” she says. And she doesn’t say anything else, so eventually Rey goes to bed.

Her sleep this week hasn’t been dreamless, but they’ve been normal dreams, no magic in them. She doesn’t know if Ben is keeping himself from her dreams somehow or if their Gifts just aren’t connecting them. At least it lets her sleep deeply for the few hours she gets each morning.

When she wakes up this time, Leia is sitting with Kaydel by the fire. Rey takes a deep breath before she goes outside and joins them.

Kaydel doesn’t linger — she has plans with Paige and Poe, apparently — but she flashes Rey a tiny smile before she goes. And then Rey is alone with Leia for the first time since Veilnight. She feels jittery and has trouble sitting still. So she fidgets in tense silence.

“It’s not easy,” Leia finally says. “It will never be easy. But I would bear every discomfort to have my son back.”

“He won’t be the same.” Rey has a cup of tea, and she holds it tightly, feeling its heat seep into her fingers. “You know he’s not the same boy you knew.”

“I know that.” Leia sits so straight, even out here on the log benches. “But he’s my son.”

She turns her head and watches Rey, who sips her tea carefully and doesn’t meet Leia’s eye. She can feel the press of questions, all the things Leia wants to ask her. The things she suspects. But in the end, she doesn’t ask any of it, and Rey can blame the flush in her cheeks on the cold air.

Eventually Leia leaves— not entirely, just back to the cabin. Luke and Maz are supposed to come up tonight so they can plan upcoming rituals. Smaller ones than Veilnight, smaller by far, but still needing planning. Before she turns to go inside, she stops and lays a hand on Rey’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she says. And then she’s gone, and Rey lets out a shaky breath.

The sun is sinking lower in the sky over the hills that lead down into the city. To the east, the forest is growing darker. Rey sips her tea — it has to get her through another night — and watches the fire dance. Soon there’ll be frost in the mornings. That’s when the flame-tending shifts get harder. Their winters are mild enough, but snow dusts the hills every year, and it sometimes takes a little spellwork to keep the flame-tenders warm enough for safety on overnight shifts.

But not quite yet. So Rey just drinks her tea and hides her nose behind her scarf, and she waits.

Luke’s car pulls up next to the cabin; he and Maz go inside to meet Leia. The sky grows darker. Night falls, and like every other night, all Rey can do is wait.

The stars have started to come out when she feels her Gift rise up in her like an ocean wave. She’s been sitting with her elbows on her knees, arms crossed, head leaning on her arms, but she sits straight up when she feels that swell. Rey watches the fire and tries to feel if her Gift is pulling in any particular direction.

And there, like an old friend, like a house whose layout she’d know in her sleep, she feels the pull to the forest.

Rey turns. Just beyond the edge of the circle, over by the trees, is Ben.

She stands up. He sees her; he’s watching her. The firelight flickers over his face, warm and friendly. Rey is holding her breath; her hands are trembling at her sides.

Ben drops his gaze and looks down at his feet. He lifts one foot and slowly steps over the border of the circle. Then the other foot. And then he’s standing just inside the circle, and nothing has happened, nothing has broken, nothing has flung him out, the fire is dancing happily and Rey’s Gift is singing in her chest and she breaks out in her biggest brightest grin and he sees it, sees her all over again, and he smiles such a scared sad hopeful smile.

Her heart cracks open wide like a breaking dam, and resolve is forgotten. She’s running across the circle, and he’s running to her, and they collide and spin each other with their momentum and wrap each other up in their arms. Rey holds onto him like he’ll disappear if she lets go. Ben holds onto her like she’s the only solid thing there is. His face is pressed into her shoulder and his breath rushes against her neck and when his hand comes up to hold her head, to touch her hair, she realizes she’s crying the happiest tears, her arms around his neck and her heart wide open to his.

Over her shoulder, she sees Maz and Luke and Leia coming out of the cabin. They’ll be here in scant moments, and she’ll have to let go, have to surrender him to everything because she can’t do this for him. But she holds onto Ben for as long as she possibly can, and she kisses his forehead so he knows, so he knows, please don’t let him forget; and when they finally have to let go, when he finally has to face what he’s come back to, she holds his hand as long as he wants to hold hers.

 

 

* * *

 

 

  
EPILOGUE

 

The first echoes of spring are creeping into the hills. More and more birds are singing in the mornings, and the snow is half-melted and giving way to mud. Some early tiny flower buds are pushing up from the winter soil. They stay closed tight, but that they’re braving the cold air at all means something is getting warmer, in the air and in the earth.

Rey makes a cup of coffee in the kitchen of the cabin, using the hand-crank grinder for the beans and slowly pouring the water through the paper cone. It’s a fussy way to make coffee, and she thinks it a little pretentious; but the process is soothing in its own way. She takes pride in a perfect pour, and the beans smell so good. It’s not enough to tempt her away from her devotion to tea, but she find she likes making a cup of coffee this way.

She makes two cups and carries them outside, shivering a little as she crosses the yard to the circle. When she gets to the log benches near the fire, she hands one cup to Leia and the other to Ben, pausing to kiss his forehead. His hand catches hers; his lips brush the back of her hand, and his eyes follow her as she smiles and slips away, leaving them together.

Rey walks the perimeter of the circle, checking on the charms hung around it. They’re all quietly humming with magic, holding up well. She looks out into the forest, pausing there for a few long moments. Somewhere on the other side, Order Coven’s circle still stands. They lost their leader, and one of their strongest witches came back to Temple Coven, but that’s only slowed them, not shut them down. It’s a work in progress. Their agenda needs to be stopped — will be stopped — and Temple is working on it, and making strides. But change doesn’t happen overnight, as Rey knows intimately.

When she sees Leia head back to the cabin, she goes over to Ben and sits next to him. His arm comes around her; she snuggles against his side, and he tucks her inside his blanket with him. “How is she?” Rey asks.

“Good, today. I think. It can be hard to tell, sometimes, with my mother.”

“How are you both?”

He hesitates. “Little pieces at a time. The whole sharing coffee routine is helping. Thank you for that, again. I’d make it myself if I could.”

“You’re tending the flame eighteen hours a day. I hardly think it’s unfair to ask me to make the coffee.”

Ben isn’t quite halfway through his year and a day of penance, but at least the weather will be warming up soon. The first leg of it has been the hardest, in more ways than one. Rey knows healing isn’t linear and even simple things aren’t always easy, but she thinks maybe things will get better and better as time rolls on.

He tends the flame alone, like Rey did that week she kept vigil, with breaks only to sleep in the cabin. That’s the terms of his reentry to Temple Coven: for a year and a day, he must tend the flame at all times except when sleeping; he must meditate and give prayers and offerings to the gods; he must do kind things for his mother. (The last part isn’t an official aspect of his penance, but it’s one he takes very seriously.) And Rey is proud to say he hasn’t wavered once, not since he set foot back inside this circle four months ago.

“How are your lessons going?” Ben asks. His hand rubs up and down her arm gently.

“Really good. Luke is even getting less grumpy about it.”

“I can’t imagine him ever not being at least a little grumpy teaching shadow-work. But I’m betting your cleansings are a lot better now with proper banishings instead of uncrossings.”

“Know-it-all.”

“But I’m right, aren’t I?”

She grins, matching his teasing grin. “Yes, Ben. You were right all along.”

“You’re a force to be reckoned with.” He kisses the top of her head. “Anyway, I can’t imagine that he’ll ever teach you hexing or anything. But binding could be helpful. Enchantments — he’s good at those. Glamours.”

“One thing at a time, Solo. It was pulling teeth just to get the banishing lessons.”

Ben leans down and nudges his nose against the side of her face. Rey tips her head back and smiles up at him. “When my penance is done,” he says, his voice that low rumble she remembers from the forest, “and I have time to myself again, I can teach you.”

She blinks slowly. “I’d like that.” She leans in and kisses his chin, which is the best she can reach without moving from under his arm. “There’s a lot of things I want to do with you when you don’t have to always be here.”

Ben lowers his face and brushes the tip of her nose with his. “What sorts of things?”

“All the things,” she murmurs, feeling her lips brush his. “Everything.” She doesn’t know who closes the gap first, but they kiss, softly. His lips are warm despite the cold air, and Rey sighs softly when he pulls away, when he leaves a scattering of feather-light kisses on her cheeks and closed eyelids, when he settles her back under his arm, his head resting on her head. They watch the fire together.

When her Gift reaches out to his these days, she still feels shadow in him, looming and powerful. It’s never going to leave him; it’s part of who he is. But the light is strong in him, too, steady as a heartbeat. And Rey is full of light — sunbeams, he had called her — but there’s shadow in her, too, deep and mysterious and subtle as mist. But that’s what makes them fit. His strong shadow, tempered by her light; her strong light, kept from blinding by his shadow. Him coaxing her to understand the shadow, to make peace with it. Her guiding him into the light, helping him learn its scattered facets.

It’s what makes her believe there’s a place for both of them in Temple Coven. It’s slow progress, and it will still take more time. There are so many old wounds that Ben has to atone for, has to try to heal. But he’s atoning, day by day, in his formal penance and in his private moments. And he’s doing it well. Because Ben, it turns out, really is awfully good at healing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> P.S. my friends: There's [super super lovely fanart](https://twitter.com/LilibethSonar/status/1167971576337141761) by @LilibethSonar on Twitter, which makes me go heart-eyes-emoji every time I look at it <3 <3 <3
> 
> P.P.S. If you're into such things, there's a whole heap of songs that provided excellent background for writing this fic. If you'd like, a few I'd recommend checking out that were particularly influential, whether in terms of themes, general atmosphere, or both:
> 
> Close Encounters (Bat for Lashes)  
> Medicine (Daughter)  
> Deep Green (Marika Hackman)  
> I Put a Spell On You (Creedence Clearwater Revival)  
> Come As You Are (as covered by Masha)  
> Me and the Devil (Soap&Skin)  
> Night Terror (Laura Marling)  
> Devil's Backbone (The Civil Wars)


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